It used to be that if something looked, felt and tasted like beef steak, it was probably beef steak, but with the advent of 3D-printing technology as well as meatless meats, that’s no longer the case.

Spanish startup NovaMeat claims to have created the world’s first 3D-printed plant based beef steak, which allegedly has the same texture and appearance as a real beef muscle cut. The Barcelona-based company was reportedly able to achieve this by “finely tuning” the structure of plant-based proteins at a microscopic level. The novel plant-based meat not only matches the unique texture of beef steak, but also its color, which should make it more appealing as a sustainable alternative to real beef steak.

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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 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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Västerbottensost cheese is known as the “Emperor of Cheeses” in Sweden. people there love its complex taste and creamy texture so much  that they use it on everything. When they can get their hands on it that is, because authentic Västerbottensost is only produced at a small factory in the village of Burträsk. People have tried producing it somewhere else several times, but it just doesn’t turn out the same.

The secret to why Västerbottensost cheese can only be produced in Burträsk has been dubbed one of Sweden’s most intriguing mysteries. Over the years, people have tried expanding production of this famous cheese in various parts of the northern country, but to no avail. They tried making it in Falkenberg, a municipality in southern Sweden, in Bollnäs, a settlement in central Sweden, and even in the city of Umeå, close to Burträsk village. but the resulting cheese just didn’t taste like the original. The same recipe and production protocol were respected to the letter, but the Västerbottensost cheese made in Burträsk always tasted better.

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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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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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The mud flats of Japan’s Ariake Sea are home to a creature that is reportedly as delicious as it is disgusting-looking. Introducing the “Warasubo”, an eel-like fish that for obvious reasons is known as the “Alien of Ariake Sea”.

If you’re familiar with H.R. Giger’s Xenomorph (the extraterrestrial creature featured in the ‘Alien’ movies), more specifically its iconic “inner mouth”, one look at the warasubo fish is enough to explain its comparison to the fictional alien. It literally looks like the piston-like appendage that Giger’s ferocious predator uses to pierce its victim’s bodies and even metal. The warasubo is a terrifying-looking thing, especially in dried form, which only makes its use as an ingredient for ramen and other Japanese foods that much stranger.

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Austin Davis, a 20-year-old man from Keystone Heights, Florida, claims to eaten almost nothing but macaroni and cheese for the last 17 years of his life.

We’ve featured picky eaters before, people who only enjoyed things like pizza or french fries, but Austin Davis isn’t one such person. Even if he tries eating something other than macaroni and cheese, and actually enjoys it, his body will immediately reject it and he’ll start to gag. Doctors say he is suffering from a psychological condition known as avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder, where new foods trigger negative physical side-effects. This condition is often linked to traumatic events, and Davis was indeed diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and removed from his home, after being physically abused by his father. This has negatively impacted his social life as well as his eating habits, but he wants to change.

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Otafuku, one of the oldest oden restaurants in japan, has been heating up the same batch of broth every day since 1945, only adding more water to it as it evaporates. It may sound gross to most westerners, but it apparently makes oden stew taste amazing.

Oden is a traditional Japanese stew that is simmered in broth until served. It’s enjoyed by vegetable and meat lovers alike, as it can contain all kinds of ingredients, from from eggs, tofu and vegetables to shark meat, beef, fish balls and whale tongue, but the secret to its deliciousness is the broth. Many Japanese restaurants rely on master stock – a broth that has been repeatedly reused to poach or braise meats – to give their oden a rich flavor, but none have been using the same batch for longer than Otafuku, a Tokyo based eatery that has been reheating the same oden broth since the previous batch was lost in 1945.

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An Ecuadorian woman has been getting a lot of attention online for devising a very unusual yet surprisingly popular ice-cream flavor – guinea pig.

You probably know the guinea pig as a lovable house pet, but in South American countries like Ecuador, Peru or Bolivia people cook guinea pigs with salt and serve them with potatoes and peanut sauce. Still, even in these countries the idea of a guinea pig-flavored ice-cream has been causing quite a bit of eyebrow raising. People are used to the rodents as the main ingredient of traditional dishes, but ice-cream flavor? That would be like turning beef into an ice-cream flavor in the United States, not exactly the kind of business venture most people would even consider getting involved in. And yet, one Quito woman has been selling hundreds of guinea pig ice cream cones per day over the last few months, and as news of her unusual delicacy spreads around the world, demand is expected to skyrocket.

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This past summer British media reported the bizarre job ad posted by an eco-conscious couple looking to pay a chef £5,000 to prepare a wedding banquet out of roadkill.

The unusual ad, featured on Bark.com, the UK’s leading online local service marketplace, mentioned that the couple had already sourced about 20kg of roadkill, including squirrel, pheasant, rabbit, partridge and deer, and were looking for someone with experience in preparing courses out of wild meats. The ideal candidate would able to skin, butcher and joint the cuts of meat, as well as prepare them in such a way that the guests wouldn’t know what meat they were eating.

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