“Who says that health foods have to taste bad?” That’s the question that inspired Italian cardiologist Dr. Valerio Sanguigni to create a tasty ice-cream with proven health benefits, including improved sport performance in youth.

It’s a known medical fact that can help improve heart health and prevent certain diseases, with some studies even linking them to living a longer life. Staples of Italian cuisine, like olive oil, tomatoes and red wine have been credited for contributing to the longevity of the Italian population, whose number of centenarians has tripled in less than 15 years. But despite their documented benefits, Dr. Sanguini believed that many antioxidant-rich health foods lost a considerable share of their properties before reaching people’s tables. He decided to solve this problem using ice-cream.

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In an attempt to create a special snack to go with their high quality beer, Sweetish brewery St. Erik’s has created the world’s most expensive potato chips.

Apparently, St. Erik’s didn’t think Lays or Pringles chips were good enough to pair with their ale, so they decided to create their own exclusive snack and price it accordingly. “St. Erik’s Brewery is one of Sweden’s leading microbreweries and we’re passionate about the craftsmanship that goes into our beer. At the same time, we felt that we were missing a snack of the same status to serve with it,” brand manager Marcus Friari said in a statement. “A first-­class beer deserves a first-­class snack, and this is why we made a major effort to produce the world’s most exclusive potato chips. We’re incredibly proud to be able to present such a crispy outcome.”

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When it comes to tasty food, nothing beats grandma’s cooking! Well, except maybe more grandmas cooking in the same kitchen, which is exactly what goes on at Staten Island’s Enoteca Maria, a charming restaurant that employs grandmas from various parts of the world, instead of professional chefs.

Enoteca Maria owner Jody Scaravella says that he came up with the idea of placing grandmothers in a restaurant kitchen about 12 years ago, after suffering a series of tragic losses. His grandmother, his mother and his sister had passed away within a few years of each other, and the idea of having an Italian grandmother in the kitchen just felt comforting to him. He got his first cooks by posting an ad in the paper seeking ‘Italian housewives to cook regional dishes’. “I was still building the restaurant then, so I asked them to come to my place to cook instead — I live in the neighborhood. And they came with dishes, and their husbands and a few grandchildren they were looking after for the day. The whole thing was like a Fellini movie,” Scaravella remembers.

But that was only the beginning. These days, the unique New York restaurant has a rotating staff of grandmothers from around 30 different places around the world, including Palestine, the Czech Republic, Argentina, Nigeria and Algeria. They are known as ‘nonnas’ – Italian for ‘grandmas’ – and take turns in cooking traditional recipes from their respective culture, offering patrons the chance to experience new and exciting dishes virtually every night.

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Andrew Dyhin, an Australian inventor and founder of the PotatoMagic company, claims that he has spent the last 12 years researching ways of transforming common potatoes into a cheese-like product that is completely dairy-free.

“The product is called chato – cheese potato. It looks like cheese and melts like cheese, but it is nothing but potato,” Dyhin says. While he won’t reveal the exact production process, he says that the potatoes are peeled, liquefied and processed with no added ingredients into a basic product that can be melted, sliced, turned into cubes or mixed with water and other ingredients to make dips, just like cheese. The PotatoMagic founder said that he is confident that chato can become a sustainable plant based alternative to cheese, milk, custard and even ice-cream.

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Chacho’s Taco, a Tex-Mex eatery in Corpus Christi, Texas, has been challenging people to finish a spectacular 4-pound All-Mighty Taco in under 10 minutes ever since its inception, 18 years ago. During that time, only 5 really hungry people have managed to do it.

The next-to-impossible eating challenge posed by Chacho’s Taco recently went viral on social media, after Norma Jean Toro, a Corpus Christi local, posted a photo of her struggling to eat the 4-pound behemoth made with a giant homemade tortilla and lots of beans, cheese, carne guisada, egg, potatoes and bacon. She failed to finish the taco, but won the admiration of the internet instead. Her post has been doing the round on social media around South Texas after receiving thousands of shares on Facebook.

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Cafe 51, a popular burger joint in Melbourne, Australia, is offering anyone the chance to receive a free burger per day, for the rest of their lives, if they get a scale tattoo of one of their delicious burgers, anywhere on their bodies.

“Tattoos are for life, so why shouldn’t burgers be free for life too, right?” the #freeburgersforlife campaign page on the Cafe 51 website states. “It’s simple, pick a burger, any burger from our current menu and get it tattooed anywhere on your body. You are then forever part of our #burgerfamily and you qualify to get this burger absolutely free everyday for the rest of your life. Coz we reckon that since you love us enough to join our #burgerfamily by getting a tattoo of one of our burgers, we love you enough to give you a free burger every day for the rest of your life!”

The controversial promotional stunt had been teased for about a month and finally launched on Sunday night. By Monday, over 450 people had registered, and at the time of this writing, over 3,000 Cafe 51 are waiting to get their favorite burger tattooed. Considering all the media attention the campaign is getting and the fact that Cafe 51 plans to take registrations all through October, the number of applicants will probably reach into the tens of thousands.

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Using extract from the hottest chilli pepper on the planet, American company Paqui Chips has created the world’s spiciest tortilla chip – the Carolina Reaper Madness. It’s apparently so hot that it only comes in packs of one.

Usually, when you open a bag of tortilla chips, you never stop at one, but when it comes to Carolina Reaper Madness chips, Jeff Day, Brand Manager for Paqui Chips, says that one is all you need. “It’s the hottest chip you’ll ever have, I can guarantee you that. After you eat that one chip, trust me, you’re not looking to dig back into the bag and have a second one. So, one chip is what we created to have the experience,” he says.

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From now on, when you get the munchies for a delicious street food snack, you’ll no longer have to choose between a hamburger and a hotdog, because you can have both in the same bun. Introducing the Hamdog, probably the craziest fast food hybrid ever.

Mark Murray, of Perth, Australia, came up with the idea for the Hamdog in 2004, and by 2009, he had already obtained a patent for the uniquely-shaped bun of the treat. Last year, he appeared on Channel 10’s Shark Tank show to pitch his idea to potential investors and secure enough funding to get his fast food business off the ground. The judges were not impressed, and even laughed when he described eating the Hamdog as “a party in your mouth”. But Murray didn’t let the experience bring him down, and one year later, he’s selling Hamdogs in his home city and wants to expand nationally.

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The Whole Shabang chips reportedly taste like heaven, but until recently, you literally had to commit a crime to get your hands on a bag. That’s because they are jail chips available exclusively to inmates and jail visitors.

To say that former inmates are obsessed with The Whole Shabang chips would be an understatement. For years, people who got to try these crunchy delicacies behind bars have been scouring the internet for them, posting messages on the Facebook page of Keefe Group – the company that supplies them to jails – and setting up groups to petition for their availability on the outside. But apart from rare eBay auctions, getting your hands on a bag of The Whole Shabang was an almost impossible task, unless you actually went to jail or visited someone there. Until not too long ago, the only place you could find them was the prison commissary.

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A number of restaurants in Germany have come up with a somewhat controversial way of fighting food waste – charging patrons a small fee if they cannot finish all the food on their plates.

Yuoki, a sushi restaurant in Stuttgart, Germany, is not your everyday all-you-can-eat buffet. For starters, there isn’t an actual buffet to fill your plate at. Instead, patrons are seated at a table and provided with iPads which they can use to order up to five small dishes every ten minutes. They can eat as much as they want for 120 minutes, but having the food delivered at short intervals allows diners to constantly assess how hungry they are and order accordingly, preventing food waste. Also, owner Luan Guoyu believes our “eyes are bigger than our stomachs”, so not being able to see the cooked food at the buffet prevents people from ordering more food that they can actually eat just because they like the way it looks.

But Luan Guoyu’s most effective way of fighting food waste, and the one that has attracted media attention, is his €1 ($1.15) fine for food still left on the plate. “It’s called ‘all-you-can-eat,’ not ‘all-you-can-chuck-away,’ he says, adding that the extra charge is not meant to increase his profits, but to act as a reminder not to waste food. In the two years since Yuoki implemented this “eat up or pay up” policy, Guoyu claims he has collected €900 ($1,020) to €1,000 ($1,133) in food waste fees, which he plans to donate to charity.

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Wouldn’t it be nice if you could enjoy a nice refreshing ice-cream on a hot summer day without having to constantly lick at it to keep it from dripping all over your hands? Well, thanks to Gastronaut ice Cream, now you can!

34-year-old Rob Collington, founder of Gastronaut Ice Cream, had always been a big fan of Astronaut Ice Cream, a freeze-dried ice cream sold at space museums and camping stores across the US. He has enjoyed eating it since he was a little boy, even though he admits it doesn’t very good, because it’s made with the cheapest ice-cream available and contains artificial ingredients. But it does have a big advantage over even the most delicious traditional ice cream – it doesn’t melt, no matter how hot the sun burns.

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Springbone Kitchen, a New York restaurant famous for its trendy bone broth, has found a way making the meaty liquid appealing even when it’s hot outside by turning it into a popsicle.

The bone broth diet trend has been around for a while, but it really picked up steam last winter when celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow, Salma Hayek and Shailene Woodley revealed they were big fans. Soup-themed stores and eateries started popping up in major U.S. cities and Dr. Kellyann’s “Bone Broth Diet” book became a bestseller, with many health dieters relying on the meat-flavored soup as a meal replacement. But while it’s understandable that the hot broth became popular during the cold winter months, it’s a lot harder to sell when it’s 90 degrees Fahrenheit outside.

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One of the last places you would expect to find a real Italian prince is driving a food truck on the streets of Los Angeles, California. But that hasn’t stopped His Royal Highness Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy, the only male heir of Italy’s exiled king, Umberto II, from trying his luck in the American mobile food business.

“I came to Los Angeles six months ago for an event and I realized there were various Mexican and Asian food trucks around,” the prince told Italian magazine, Chi. “I thought ‘why don’t I try it?’ With a food truck with fresh Italian pasta that is loved around the world.” So he bought himself a food truck, painted it in the colors of House Savoy and named it “Prince of Venice”, after one of his would-be titles which are not recognized by the Italian government.

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Meat doesn’t sound like a great ingredient for desserts, but that’s probably because you’ve never tried ‘tavuk göğsü’, a creamy, sweet pudding with chicken breast as its main ingredient.

Legend has it that tavuk göğsü was invented centuries ago, when one of the sultans of the Ottoman Empire got a craving for something sweet in the middle of the night and cooks at the Palace of Topkapı had to work with the only ingredient left in their kitchen – chicken. That’s just a legend though, and even in Turkey, a country so proud of its rich culture, there are those who claim there isn’t any chicken at all in tavuk göğsü. It certainly doesn’t taste anything like chicken, but Turkish cooks specializing in this unique dessert say it’s because the meat is pounded into small bits and boiled until it dissolves in the pudding. Its main purpose is to give tavuk göğsü a different texture than regular puddings.

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San Francisco-based startup Impossible Foods might have just achieved the impossible – making plants tastes like meat. Their Impossible Burger is made entirely of plants, but sizzles on the grill, oozes fat and reportedly tastes like a delicious cooked beef patty.

Red meat consumption around the world is at an all time high, but producing high quantities of meat to satisfy demand is not sustainable and it’s already taking a heavy toll on the environment. In recent years, experts have been busy coming up with alternatives to animal meat, like switching to a protein-rich insect-based diet, growing meat in the lab and even artificial meat made from sewage mud. But one San-Francisco company may have discovered a much more viable solution – a mashup of plant-based ingredients that tastes just like real meat. Impossible Foods has been working on an alternative to meat for the last five years, and its soon-to-be-launched Impossible Burger is already receiving high praise for its likeness to beef patties in taste, texture and appearance.

When former Stanford biochemist Patrick Brown founded Impossible Foods, he set his goal on creating a product that would change the world, and the Impossible Burger might do just that. He and his research team have spent years analyzing meat molecules to find out what makes a burger taste, smell and cook the way it does, in the belief that everything animal can be replicated using plant-based compounds. And judging by the testimonies of the few people who have actually sampled this revolutionary burger, Brown was right.

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