Paying $100 for a donut seems crazy, but Donutopia is no ordinary confectionery, it’s a culinary masterpiece covered in 24-karat gold flakes and edible sugar diamonds. These treats are made with the finest ingredients, including $39 Bling H2O water.

“Each one takes three to five hours to make,” says Jeanne Kaminski, co-owner of Dolicious Donuts in West Kelowna, Canada, where the delectable donuts were invented. They were inspired by a loyal customer who wanted to use one of their creations to propose to his girlfriend. He asked for a cream-filled Bismarck donut to act as a pillow for the engagement ring, but they decided to make him something truly impressive. The first Donutopia got such positive feedback that they decided to include it on the menu.

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If you love odd culinary combinations, then the ‘dausage’ is just the thing for you. The half-donut, half-sausage is a savory-sweet mash-up of pork or beef and jam or custard, invented by web developer and food lover Liam Bennett.

“I was inspired to invent the dausage by the success of the cronut and the duffin,” the 37-year-old from Wales said. “I love jam donuts, and I really love those products, but I wanted to make something a bit different, so I came up with the idea of trying a sausage. I was trying to think what else you could mix with a donut. I was looking at things that go well with sweet things, duck with plum sauce. I thought I’d give the sausage a go because, well, I eat sausages.”

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Lots of people love Chipotle, but how many eat there every single day? According to recent news reports at least two. Mark Rantal and Andrew Hawryluk have been at the popular Mexican grill for over 100 days straight!

Rantal, 30, who has been eating at the restaurant for 108 days now, said he got into the practice by accident. “On Monday, I decided to get Chipotle and on Tuesday, I made the same decision, then got lunch with my friend there on Wednesday,” he told reporters. “We laughed about it at lunch and he asked how long I thought I could go. And that began the thought.”

Soon, Rantal hit one week, and then a month, and then he just kept going from there. “Every time I hit a milestone, it was very easy and convenient to imagine hitting the next,” he said. And he got the same meal every single time – a burrito bowl with white rice, pinto beans, fajitas, sofritas, mild salsa, corn, medium salsa, cheese and lettuce.

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Every year, during the rainy season, trillions of midges – small flies – rise from the water of Lake Victoria, in Africa, and fly in giant swarms that are said to be so dense they can suffocate a person. However, for the people living on the shores of the great lake, they are just a welcome source of protein.

Some bird species migrate to Lake Victoria during the rainy season so they can take advantage of this free feast. The flies create a sort of constantly buzzing living smog and cover every available surface as they break off from their mating ritual. But no matter how many of them are gobbled up by birds and other natural predators, there are always more than enough for the locals. As disgusting as eating flies may seem, the reality is they make up a huge quantity of biomass equivalent with large herds of big game. People living on the shores of Lake Victoria simply can’t ignore the nutritious protein flying all around them, so they catch the flies and cook them as charcoal-black fly burgers.

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Researchers at Oregon State University have made the mother of all discoveries – they’ve recently patented a strain of seaweed that’s not only rich in protein, but tastes remarkably like delicious bacon when cooked.

Dulse (Palmaria sp.) is a red marine algae that grows along the Pacific and Atlantic coastlines and is sold for up to $90 a pound in dried form as a cooking ingredient or dietary supplement. However, Chris Langdon and his colleagues at Oregon State University have patented a new strain of dulse that’s bound to revolutionize the health food industry. Not only is it an excellent source of minerals, vitamins and antioxidants and contains up to 16 percent protein in dry weight, but it actually tastes amazing. How amazing? Bacon amazing, according to Langdon.

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A video of a piece of beef twitching as if it were alive has been doing the rounds online for the last two weeks creeping out viewers and even turning some of them into vegetarians.

Chinese meat has been getting a lot of news coverage lately. Just last week we reported about the now-famous “zombie meat” – cheap meat as old as 40 years smuggled into the country and sold to small restaurants – and these days everyone’s talking about “Frankenstein meat”. Luckily, this one is actually safe for human consumption, although it looks arguably creepier than zombie meat.

So what’s this all about, then? Around two weeks ago, Cheng Tan, a woman from Shandong Province, China, bought a piece of fresh meat, and just as she was getting ready to slice it on her kitchen table, she noticed it was moving. She quickly reached for her smartphone, recorded a video of the creepy twitching meat and posted it online. The minute-long clip was viewed tens of millions of times on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter and eventually found its way onto Western websites, where it went viral again.

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Popular whisky brand Johnnie Walker has launched a bizarre new product that they claim will enhance the taste of your drink. ‘The Johnnie Walker Boldest Wax’ collection is a flavored mustache wax that when applied generously makes every sip of whisky taste better!

Priced at about £7.99 ($12) a pot, the hand-mixed waxes are made of 100 percent natural beeswax. They come in three flavors – Piperine Pepper, Citrus Essence, and Ginger Root – and are designed to complement the Johnnie Walker and ginger cocktail serve. They supposedly carry a scent that “lingers beneath the nostrils.”

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A major food safety scandal involving fake rice recently rocked China; news reports suggested that the grains were made by mixing potatoes with industrial synthetic resin. There were also rumors of the “cheap but profitable” rice being exported to other Asian countries, including Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, and India.

The fake grains supposedly cannot be distinguished from natural rice when raw. The only way to identify plastic rice is by cooking it – it remains hard and is difficult to digest. One publication explained that soup cooked with plastic rice will form a plastic film over the top, which burns when heated.

Health experts are warning people that these grains, if consumed, could wreak havoc on the digestive system. According to an official from the Chinese Restaurant Association, eating three bowls of plastic rice would equal consuming one plastic bag!

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Looking for super-fresh mushrooms? Head on over to a Kroger grocery store in Indiana, where you can pick them yourself.

Instead of selling already picked and packaged button mushrooms, Kroger grocery stores in Indianapolis and Bloomington, Indiana, give customers the chance to pick them by hand from a compost stand. Sure, you have to get your hands a little dirty, but at least you know they are as fresh as can be.

Photos of the unique pick-you-own stand at Kroger were first posted on Reddit a few months ago, and got mostly positive reactions from users of the popular news sharing website, while some expressed concerns about food waste, since the pictures showed a lot of already picked mushrooms left on the compost stand by picky customers. However, as one user pointed out, there’s really no waste with mushrooms, as the staff can just make new compost out of them and grow new ones.

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Believe it or not, the world’s most expensive cheese doesn’t come from cows or goats, but from donkeys. Made on a farm in Serbia, ‘Pule Cheese’ is made from Balkan donkey milk and costs a hefty $1,000 per pound! It is a crumbly white cheese, apparently popular for its intense flavor and natural saltiness.

The world’s supply of pule comes from a single herd of Balkan donkeys that live on a farm in the Zasavica Special Nature Preserve, Serbia. Part of the reason this cheese is so expensive is that donkeys don’t yield too much milk, and they all have to be milked by hand, three times a day. Apparently, 15 donkeys yield about a gallon of milk, and it takes 3.5 gallons to make a pound of pule cheese. The donkeys of the Zasavica Special Nature Preserve only produce enough milk to make around 200 pounds of pule cheese a year, which makes it very hard to come by.

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Due to inconveniences caused to the Andersen family, we have decided to remove this article, but you can still read their story on Zero Carb Zen.

Inspired by the growing trend of photographing your food and sharing the photos online before tucking in, a Tel Aviv restaurant has launched a special program that allows patrons to take the best food photos possible. Called “Foodography”, the unique concept relies on color-coordinated dishes, perfect lighting and custom-designed plates that either spin around to offer different photo angles, or come with a smartphone holder, to make the photos worth sharing on sites like Instagram or Pinterest.

“We wanted to reconnect with a new generation of customers – youngsters who connect with food through the lens of a smartphone,” said a spokesman for Carmel Winery, the company that developed the concept along with Baumann Ber Rivnay advertising agency.

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In a bid to cash in on the latest beauty trend of consuming collagen, Japanese company ‘Suntory Holdings Ltd’ has released a special brew of collagen-infused beer.

The trend has Japanese women believing that eating copious amounts of collagen – the structural protein of connective tissues – will lead to beautiful, younger-looking skin. The seemingly innocuous trend has caught on rapidly – stores are filled collagen-laced beauty products, and women are willing to gulp spoonfuls of powdered collagen mixed into protein shakes. They also flock to restaurants that serve foods naturally high in collagen – pig trotters, chicken skin and shark fin.

But the collagen-infused beer, called ‘Precious’, is a stroke of marketing genius – now women can get drunk and beautiful at the same time! Suntory announced the new product on April 7 – it is a light beer, containing 2 grams of collagen and 5% alcohol per can. Their tag declares: “Guys can tell if a girl is taking collagen or not.”

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Believe it or not, diet whisky is now a real thing. Which is surprising, because whiskey lovers have always been characterized with a sense of sophistication. It’s rather inconceivable that a person who drinks and enjoys the amber spirit might care for its calorie content.

Nevertheless, the makers of ‘Sinfully Thinn Light Whiskey’ do seem to believe in its potential. The new brand was announced recently and according to news reports, its website previously contained some information about how the unusual beverage was developed in order to keep the calorie count low. Unfortunately, the information on the company website has now been taken down. It only consists of a landing page with a short message about updates in progress.

“THINN Light Whiskey is vacuum distilled in small batches resulting in a low temperature distilled process highlighting the sweetness and smooth wheat finish,” the makers claimed. “From the clean and narrow design of the bottle to the fine and narrow “hearts” cut, empowers THINN to hold to the highest of standards. It is the most desirable and first Light Whiskey to Market.”

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Lots of people are into growing their own food these days, and it looks like restaurants are trying to catch up too. Hollywood restaurant ‘Tender Greens’, for instance, is filled with vertical gardens, and everything they grow is served on the menu!

“We’ve always been interested in growing on-site,” said Erik Oberholtzer, co-founder of the California-based fast food chain. “But all of our restaurants are in high-density urban areas, so aside from a few planter boxes we thought there was nothing beyond decorative that we could ever do.”

But when Erik and the other founders started researching vertical gardens, they came across the concept of aeroponic towers from Green City Farms. These towers are basically plant-filled poles that can easily blend in, pretty much anywhere. So they decided to get some for their Hollywood location.

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