The Volkswagen Golf has historically been the German car maker’s best selling model, but surprisingly it’s not the company’s best selling product. That title goes to the uber popular and reportedly delicious VW sausage.

VW has been producing sausages at its car plant in Wolfsburg, Germany, for nearly 50 years. The traditional wurst is such an important part of the company culture and history that it even has its own car part code,  199 398 500 A. Sausage production at VW began in 1973, and was originally supplied exclusively to company cafeterias, to feed its staff. Over time, however, Volkswagen started selling its sausages at stadiums and in German stores, and people loved them. It’s said that because the wurst was originally created for company staff, it is of the very best quality, and it has actually won several awards at national food fairs and exhibitions over the years.

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Matt Nadin, a father of three from Barnsley, in the UK, wanted his 40th birthday to be special, so he celebrated it by eating a McDonald’s Big Mac menu that he had buried in his friend’s backyard a year before.

Just before his 39th birthday, Nadin came up with the “McDonald’s 365” challenge, which basically involved buying a Big Mac menu – burger, fries and a milkshake – put it in a plastic container and bury it for a year in his friend Andy Thompson’s garden. He had intended to dig it out on his 40th birthday, in November of last year, as a special way of celebrating, but only found time to retrieve the container earlier this month. The food didn’t look great, and tasted even worse, but Matt stuck to his guns and got everything down despite a lot of burping and gagging.

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A 45-year-old Belgian man claims that he has eaten only potato fries and a fricadelle – Dutch hot dog – for dinner every day ever since he was 13.

Rudy Gybels, a resident of Schaffen in Belgium’s Flemish Brabant province, has had the same food for dinner every evening since he was a teenager. It all started when he was 13, when his mother, desperate to get him to eat more fruits and vegetables, came up with a compromise solution. Rudy would eat healthy food at lunch, and he was free to enjoy his favorite food – potato fries – for dinner. And he has been sticking to that deal ever since, eating only fries for dinner every evening for the last 32 years.

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The cakes below may look perfect to satisfy your sweet tooth, but they’re actually not desserts at all. They’re made of instant noodles and topped with stuff like chicken gulai (curry stew), opor (coconut milk stew) and rendang (beef simmered in coconut and spices).

The people at Tot Aw (short for totally awesome) bakery in Jakarta, Indonesia have getting a lot of attention lately and it’s all due to their unusual cakes. Instead of sweet sponge and sweet cream and toppings, they are made of Indomie noodles shaped as tiered cakes and topped with all kinds of foods, like meatballs, chicken or salted cuttlefish. The squiggly creations are apparently quite popular at weddings, birthdays and other events.

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A professor of experimental psychology recently unveiled a wearable patch infused with bacon flavor that is supposed to help curb meat cravings.

Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford, teamed up with plant-based food company Strong Roots to create a patch that, when scratched, produces a smell similar to that of cooked bacon. The idea behind this strange invention is that the human mind is connected to our senses of taste and smell, and that certain smells can significantly reduce food cravings.

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If you thought Coca Cola Vanilla was weird soft drink, the flavors developed by Shizuoka Prefecture-based company Kimura Beverage will probably blow your mind.

When it comes to new and completely unexplored soft drink flavors, Kimura Beverage is considered somewhat of a pioneer in Japan. Remember, this is the same country where limited edition flavors for popular soft drinks – like sakura Pepsi or Coca Cola Apple – are pretty much the norm. What sets Kimura apart from any other drinks company is the originality of their flavors, which range from pickled plums to fish eggs and potato chips.

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Rather than improve his noodle recipe, a restaurant owner in China’s Guangxi Province would lace his noodles with opium to get patrons addicted and increase the chances of them coming back for more.

The restaurateur’s dirty trick was uncovered by mistake, after someone who ate at his local in Sanjiang Dong Automonous County tested positive for morphine, the active component in opium, during a police inspection. The shocked man insisted that he had not willingly taken drugs, and told investigators that the only thing he had ingested that he couldn’t vouch for was a bowl of noodles at a local restaurant. That’s how police ended up making a surprise visit to the noodle shop in question, where they took a packet of snail powder which tested positive for morphine.

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A group of scientists from ETH Zurich and FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland recently filed a patent for a process that makes chocolates shimmer in rainbow colors without using food coloring.

The story of shimmering rainbow chocolate began on the corridors of a university building, when food scientist Patrick Rühs, materials scientist Etienne Jeoffroy and physicist Henning Galinski started chatting about chocolate during their coffee break. The main focus of their discussion is whether it would be possible to make chocolate in other colors than brown and white, and if so, how. Intrigued by the complexity of the topic, they started looking into chocolate, its properties and what makes it brown. Then they started conducting playful experiments in the kitchen of ETH University.

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The ripe berries of the genipa tree, called genipapo, have long been used throughout Central and South America to make syrups and liquors, but for a few years now unripe genipapo berries have become highly sought after for their ability to turn foods blue.

The coloring properties of unripe genipapo berries have been documented since the colonization of South America, when Europeans reported its use by local communities like the Tupinambás and the Pataxós as a temporary tattoo dye, but it wasn’t until 2014 that people learned about its potential to turn food blue as well. It was then that professor and biologist Valdely Kinupp published his book, Unconventional Food Plants in Brazil, where he detailed a process for extracting an edible blue pigment from genipapo berries. Natural blue pigments are very rare in the food industry, so Kinupp’s discovery caused quite a stir which eventually turned into a blue food craze.

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A Western Australian man claims to have successfully cooked a whole pork roast by leaving it inside a car for about 10 hours on a very hot day. Although he conducted the experiment for fun, the man did warn people not to leave their kids or pets in their cars during the summer.

Stu Pengelly, from Perth, in Western Australia, decided to see what would happen if he left a 1,5 kg pork roast on the front seat of his old Datsun for ten hours on a hot summer day. He put the meat in at around 7 a.m, when the thermometer showed a bearable 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) inside the beat-up vehicle, but by midday, temperatures reached a scorching 81 degrees Celsius (more than 177 Fahrenheit). Pengelly monitored the temperature throughout the day, and when the ten hours were up, he took the pork, sliced it and even took a few bites to show that it was cooked.

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Airplane food isn’t exactly considered “haute cuisine”, but one budget airline is betting that people love its airplane food so much that they’d be willing to pay for it at restaurants on the ground.

AirAsia, the largest budget carrier in Asia, has announced plans to open over 100 restaurants globally within the next five years. The restaurants will be offering the same menu AirAsia sells on flights, including chicken rice, the airline’s signature Pak Nasser’s Nasi Lemak dish, pineapple fish, noodle chicken inasal with garlic rice, and onde-onde cake . The move is part of AirAsia’s plans to become a lifestyle brand, and the company hopes that its Asia dishes will make people choose it over Western competitors.

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In case the title of this article wasn’t clear enough, the turkey in the picture below ins’t actually raw meat, skin and bones, but an edible cake made of sponge, butter cream and marzipan.

Even knowing that you’re looking at an expertly made optical illusion, it’s still pretty hard to believe that it’s not really a turkey ready to go into the oven. Everything from the pink, plucked skin, to the properly-proportioned wings and drumsticks was perfectly executed by English cake artist Sarah Hardy. Using her experience as a wax sculpture artist, Hardy is able to mold layers of sponge cake, chocolate and sugar or marzipan icing into all kinds of realistic designs, from human organs to birds and frogs.

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Just a week after Brooklyn-based startup Air Co. unveiled its carbon-negative, air-based vodka, a California start-up announced a new type of “meatless meat” made from air.

Appropriately named Air Protein, the Bay Area company allegedly used technology developed by NASA, to transform carbon dioxide (CO2) into protein, the same way plants do. During the 1960’s, the U.S. space agency started looking for a way to feed astronauts on a year-long mission by relying on the one resource its crew produced in abundance – CO2. During their research, scientists discovered a class of microbes called hydrogenotrophs able to convert carbon dioxide into protein. The resulting powder could be used to create pastas and shakes, but Air Protein now wants to use it to create a meat alternative.

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If you’re keen on trying the blackest coffee around, you may want to give the Matte Black Latte at Round K cafe in New Your City a Try. As the owner of the place puts it, “it’s black like my soul”.

When people say they want their coffee black, they usually mean they want it with no cream or sugar, but Round K owner, Ockhyeon Byeon, wanted to give it a more literal meaning. To him, black coffee was just a dark brown, so he started thinking of ways to make the popular drink actually black. At first, he used different types of activated charcoal, which we’ve seen used in many other goth treats, like pitch black fish and chips, or jet black cheddar cheese, but then he settled on coconut ash, which not only gave the product its dark color, but a nutty flavor as well.

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Artisans at London-based design studio Bompass & Parr teamed up with scientists at the Aerogelex laboratory in Hamburg, Germany, to transfer the properties of the world’s lightest solid material into an edible dessert.

Aerogel was invented in 1931, by American chemist Samuel Kistler as part of a bet he made with fellow scientist Charles Learned over who could replace the water in gels with air, without causing shrinkage. With an air content of  95% – 99.8%, aerogel is recognized as the lightest solid in the world, so it made sense for designers at Bompass & Parr to try and emulate the making-of process of aerogel to create the world’s lightest dessert.

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