It sounds tantalizing, a utensil that alerts you if something’s wrong with the food you’re about to eat. That’s the pitch made by Chinese search engine company Baidu—that nation’s equivalent of Google—about its new prototype “smart chopsticks.”
Named “Kuaisou,” the prototype version of the chopsticks can allegedly identify the quality of cooking oil, a big issue in China, where smaller restaurants often use cheaper oil dredged from sewers and garbage disposals. Just two weeks ago, hundreds of Taiwanese bakeries and eateries were found to have sold desserts and other dishes made with adulterated oil, known as “gutter oil.”
In a speech at the company’s annual technology conference in early September, Baidu CEO Robin Li promised, “In the future, via Baidu Kuaisou, you’ll be able to know the origin of oil and water and other foods–whether they’ve gone bad and what sort of nutrition they contain.”
The chopsticks aren’t ready for prime time, but if the technology does live up to its billing, it could have major potential, says Purnendu C. Vasavada, PhD, professor emeritus of food science, University of Wisconsin-River Falls and principal and managing member of PCV & Associates, LLC.
“As demonstrated by the nearly 300,000 illnesses in China from melamine adulteration of infant formula, economically motivated adulteration of food (EMA) has the potential to result in serious public health consequences,” he notes. Adulterated foods like “garbage oils” are deliberately designed to evade detection, he says, making them a more confounding challenge to the food industry and regulators than foodborne pathogens. “Large-scale EMA incidents have been described in the scientific literature, but smaller incidents have been documented only in media sources. Prevention and detection of EMA cannot depend on traditional food safety strategies and will require innovative detection methods.”
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