In 1976, Roger Bennatti, a chemistry teacher at George Stevens Academy, in Maine, unwrapped a fresh Twinkie and placed it atop a classroom chalkboard so he and his students could see how long it took for it to decompose. 40 years later, that question remains unanswered, because mould simply refuses to grow on the world’s oldest Twinkie.

The official shelf-life of a Twinkie – as stated by the company making them nowadays – is only 25 days, but as the famous Twinkie of George Stevens Academy clearly shows, it’s really a lot longer than that. It has been sitting in a glass case for four decades now, and even though it might not be safe to eat, it is looking fantastic for its age. Its shape hasn’t change a bit, and if mould hasn’t grown on it so far, chances are it never will.

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Red meat hardly seems like the perfect ingredient for delicious chocolate, but a New Zealand-based food scientist is willing to bet that his high-protein, 50% beef chocolate recipe is going to be a hit.

Mustafa Farouk, Senior Food Technologist at Ag Research has partnered with Auckland boutique chocolate maker Devonport Chocolates to bring meat chocolate to the masses. The quirky idea of combining the two very different ingredients came to Dr. Farouk one day, while looking at ways of adding value to beef and pondering ways the staple food might be consumed in the future. Mixing beef and chocolate seemed like the perfect way for people to get proteins and other nutrients in meat, because chocolate is such a popular dessert.

So Farouk took a very lean cut from the hind quarter of a Waikato-raised bovine, turned into what he calls “chocolate butter”, which I assume is a sort of fine paste, and handed it over to Devonport Chocolates to use in their confectionery. The resulting combination reportedly has a consistency similar to a Turkish delight, and while the food scientist admits you can tell that it’s not regular chocolate, the taste of meat is almost impossible to pick up. In an interview with the New Zealand Herald, Farouk described the taste of beef chocolate as “wonderful”, adding that although people are initially put off by the unique dessert when they here it is 50% beef, once they bite into it and taste the rich chocolate flavor, most agree that it is excellent.

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If you’re all alone on your couch watching TV and can’t decide between drinking a glass of wine or stuffing yourself with ice-cream, you’ll be happy to know you can now have both, thanks to Winecream, an ingenious dessert that combines wine and gourmet ice-cream.

Created by Crossroads Company, a family-owned business in Baltimore, Winecream is a mashup of craft-made fruit wines and super-premium, gourmet ice-cream. Customers get to choose a wine from various house-made options including pineapple, mixed berry, peach, or strawberry, which is then mixed in to a cream and sugar base and flash frozen using liquid nitrogen, a food-safe cryogenic liquid that’s nearly -320 degrees Fahrenheit. First announced back in 2014, Winecream has so far only been available at wine festivals and private events, but Crossroads Company has recently made the adult dessert available for online orders and plans to launch it in liquor stores in Baltimore and Washington D.C. later this summer.

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You couldn’t really tell by just looking at it, but this pitch black ice-cream doing the rounds on photo-sharing sites like Instagram is actually coconut flavored. It’s made with coconut milk, coconut cream, coconut flakes, and, for that unique confusing color, coconut ash.

The Coconut Ash Ice-cream recently made its debut at Morgenstern’s Finest Ice-Cream parlor, in downtown Manhattan, New York. Owner Nick Morgenstern said he had been “monkeying around with coconut ash for a while”, and then had a fancy chocolate bar which also used the ash as an ingredient. So when he finally decided to include coconut as a flavor in his new ice-cream menu, it all came together. “I just had to use it,” he says. As bizarre a color as jet-black may seem for an ice-cream that’s not chocolate or coffee flavored, it proved a big hit with customers, who instantly started flooding Instagram with snaps of the unusual treat.

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The last ingredient you would expect to find in a delicious doughnut is bone marrow, but that’s apparently the secret behind this popular treat served at a New York doughnut shop.

The doughnut market has become very competitive in recent years, and businesses have to come up with something really special to get an edge. Some rely on crazy combinations to create hybrids like the popular Cronut, others cover their doughnuts with extravagant decorations like edible gold and sugar diamonds – see Donutopia, the $100 doughnut – and a few go the bizarre route. The treat we’re talking about today falls in the latter category.

The Doughnut Project, a fancy bakery in New York city, partnered with local butcher shop Hudson & Charles to create what we believe is the world’s first bone marrow doughnut. That sounds pretty disgusting, but the experienced bakers claim that bone marrow actually makes their hand-crafted, yeast-raised doughnuts more delicious. The chocolate pastry cream filling is whipped with roasted bone marrow that apparently enhances its richness and gives it a velvet-smooth texture. The unique treat is also glazed in clementine and sprinkled with orange-infused chocolate shavings.

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Popping and sucking a candy balloon is probably a sight you’d expect to see at a kid’s party, but it’s what all the adults are doing at this Michelin three-star restaurant in Chicago. They come dressed in their finest for an evening of elegant dining, but once they arrive at ‘Alinea’, patrons are encouraged to embrace their inner child with their latest dessert offering – the Edible Helium Balloon.

The dish, created by head chef and Aliena co-owner Grant Achatz, is now being touted as one of the coolest desserts ever produced in the US. Achatz recently released a video on how the balloon is made – the process starts off with making a green apple taffy base, which is then blown up using a tube connected to a helium tank. The result is a transparent balloon that is tied with a ‘string’ made of dehydrated granny smith apple. The entire confection is then sprinkled with a dusting of green sugar.

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Beef noodle soup might not be the most glamorous dish you could order at a restaurant, but a serving of the comfort food can certainly leave you feeling satiated. Is it worth a whopping $300, though? Because that’s what a bowl of the ‘world’s best noodle soup’ costs at this popular Taiwanese restaurant.

In case you’re wondering, the soup doesn’t contain bizarre ingredients like diamonds or dirt, and it isn’t infused with healthy stuff like collagen or anthocyanin. It’s a simple beef bowl recipe, albeit one that Chef Wang Cong-yuan has spent the past 26 years researching and perfecting. The special beef noodle soup is currently served at his small 40-seat restaurant, Niu Ba Ba (Daddy Cow), in Taiwan.

“From the age of forty, I have focused on making a good bowl of beef noodles,” Wang said. “It’s quality over quantity. My ultimate goal is to make the world’s best beef noodle soup.”

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This colorful grilled cheese looks like it belongs in a My Little Pony show, but it’s actually a real treat that’s all the rage in Hong Kong. It’s called the Rainbow Sandwich and consists of two slices of bread four different types of cheese, flavorings and, obviously, a lot of food dye.

The sandwich, a creation of Kala Toast, recently got its five minutes of fame after Instagram user @hkfoodiexblogger posted a photograph of the snack along with a brief review on his account. It got shared by his fans and eventually went viral after being picked up by major websites.

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This intricate, lacy wedding dress would make any bride feel beautiful on her big day, but surprisingly, it isn’t meant to be worn. That’s because it’s really a masterfully executed cake, and all the pretty frills and ruffles are actually white icing. But it’s so convincing, you can barely tell that it’s not real, even in close-up photographs.

The remarkable dessert was created by award-winning cake sculptor Sylvia Elba, in collaboration with artist Ilinka Rnic, and Fun N Funky Cakes founder Yvette Marner. It took the talented trio over 300 hours to complete, but in the end, they all agreed that the 70-kg heavy, 170-cm tall hyperrealistic cake-dress was totally worth it. They’re now calling it the world’s first “Weddible Dress”.

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Bread has long since been considered the enemy of dieters, but this new weird-looking bread might just change the way we look at the staple food forever. White bread is linked to obesity and high blood pressure, but a Singaporean food scientist claims he has come up with a way of solving these problems, while retaining the texture and flavor of bread. There’s just one catch though – his bread is purple.

Professor Zhou Weibiao, of the National University of Singapore, wanted to find a way to change the formula of bread while retaining its soft texture and wonderful taste. The result was purple bread, which he says is made entirely from natural ingredients. He started by extracting anthocyanin – the natural blue pigment found in foods like grapes and blueberries – from black rice, leaving behind its starchy compounds. He infused the anthocyanin into bread dough and used it to bake loaves that are apparently much better for you than white bread.

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Plenty of people have quit their jobs to start a career in the food industry, but Tara and Sasha Bouis are a bit different. The young couple abandoned their successful careers to set up a food boat called ‘Pizza π’ – the marine equivalent of a food truck – and serve pizza in the middle of the ocean!

“Pizza speaks to everybody,” said Tara, 32, who used to be an elementary school teacher. “Food trucks had become a part of everyday life – food boats had not. We knew that the concept was strange but we thought it could work, because the food is very recognisable.”

Sasha, 38, an MIT graduate who worked as a computer programmer at Standard & Poor’s, was fed up with his job and was looking for other interesting careers even before he met Tara. “I thought I was living the dream but quickly got tired of it,” he told Bloomberg Business. “I was walking farther and farther away from my office on my lunch break, and I walked past a sailing school and thought, I wonder if I could get a job there?”

That was 10 years ago, in 2005, and Sasha ended up quitting his job and moving to Puerto Rico to work on sailboats. Then he moved to the British Virgin Islands (BVI) to teach sailing at a summer camp. That’s when he met Tara, who happened to be working there as a special-education elementary school teacher that summer. The couple fell in love, settled in the Virgin Islands, and married in 2012.

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When artisanal pasta maker Stephanie Richard added insects to her pasta on a whim, she had know idea what a huge hit it would become. The demand for her ‘protein-rich’, crunchy noodles is now so huge that she’s struggling to keep up with orders!

Richards, who strongly believes that insects are “the protein of the future”, said she got the idea for adding them to pasta in 2012, while trying to develop a high-protein version for athletes. That’s when an insect distributor in eastern Lyon contacted her about adding bugs to her pasta, and she was completely sold on the idea. She started producing insect flour pasta around Christmas that year, and the product pretty much started flying off the shelves. Her shop launched the unusual pasta just before the winter holidays, and sold around 500 bags in a matter of days.

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People generally tend to pick out the best looking fruits and vegetables when shopping for produce, but Canadian supermarket chain Loblaws is tempting customers with misshapen, blemished produce instead, by pricing them 30 percent lower than normal-looking ones.

A trial run of the ugly food line, named ‘Naturally Imperfect’, began in March last year with only apples and potatoes to choose from. Consumer demand has been so huge that Loblaws is now going to introduce more unsightly vegetable and fruit options like peppers, onions, and mushrooms. The line is available at other stores as well, including Real Canadian Superstore, Zehrs, and Your Independent Grocer.

All the produce that will be sold through Naturally Imperfect would otherwise have been used in juices, sauces, or soups, or would have not been harvested at all. Senior Loblaw director Dan Branson explained last year that this sort of program was a win-win arrangement for both food producers who would otherwise have to let substandard harvest go to waste, and consumers who could afford fresh produce at regular prices. And he was right, given how popular the line has become.

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Canadian software engineer James McGowan is so passionate about McDonald’s that he’s traveled to 53 different countries just to sample their regional dishes. In the past four years, he’s reviewed over 300 items from the chain’s wide-ranging regional menus on his blog, Traveling McD’s.

James started his McDonald’s tasting trips in 2005, sharing pictures of every meal with friends and family and posted his first review of a McD’s regional treat in October 2011, when he wrote about a taro and Oreo McFlurry he had tried in Macau. Since then he’s reviewed exotic McDelicacies from countries like Russia, Malaysia, Tahiti, Greece, Germany, and Qatar. Interestingly, he doesn’t always have to wait until he travels to a country to try their McD’s menu, as fans of his blog sometimes send him food to try to Bangkok, where he currently resides. 

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Thanks to Memphis Meats, slaughtering animals for food might soon become a thing of the past. The company made its global debut on February 4, unveiling the world’s first meatball made from 100 percent lab-grown, cultured beef. In the next three to four years, they hope to offer consumers meat that’s cheaper and more environmentally friendly than traditional farming.

“We love meat. But like most Americans, we don’t love the many negative side effects of conventional meat production: environmental degradation, a slew of health risks, and food products that contain antibiotics, fecal matter, pathogens, and other contaminants,” the company’s website states.

“Our concept is simple. Instead of farming animals to obtain their meat, why not farm the meat directly? To that end, we’re combining decades of experience in both the culinary and scientific fields to farm real meat cells – without the animals – in a process that is healthier, safer, and more sustainable than conventional animal agriculture.”

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