The bottle you can eat between meals

Forget biodegradable and stop worrying about closed loop recycling? According to David Edwards PhD, founding core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, it will soon be possible to create edible bottles that taste the same as the contents.

Harvard University experts working on the concept have filled an orange membrane with orange juice, a tomato-flavoured enclosure with gazpacho (cold Spanish/Portuguese tomato-based raw vegetable soup) and grape packages with wine.

Biomedical engineer David Edwards said that he hopes to create a prototype of the bottle out of 'WikiCells' soon.

"In the near-term, we will be encountering WikiCells in restaurant settings as a novelty item," he said.

WikiCells is an edible material created from a biodegradable polymer or plastic and food particles. Essentially, it's an egg-like membrane hard shell. It can be filled with a variety of flavours, including orange juice, wine or chocolate.

It could form either a layer that you could peel off a bottle, or, one day, make the entire container. The product, a membrane created using a biodegradable plastic combined with food particles, could either be peeled off or potentially eaten whole.

"People in a village in Africa could become plastic bottle-free. It's really exciting from a humanitarian point of view," said Edwards, who hopes to produce a WikiCell machine that could allow people, especially in the developing world, to make their own bottles without relying on plastic.


Orange juice and tomato soup is one thing, but I wonder if WikiCells can be made to taste like water?

Source: Harvard University/Daily Mail