Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is one of my all-time favorite movies (the Gene Wilder version. Not the Johnny Depp abomination), and it's been really cool, over the years, to see some of the film's confections become realities. You can get a Scrumdillyicious bar in the checkout line. I've had an Everlasting Gobstopper, or two, in my time. Of course, the ones I really wanted to sample were the Fizzy Lifting drink and the Three-Course Dinner Gum. You know, the ones that couldn't possibly ever exist. The ones that were too fantastical to ever be true.
Well...maybe not. At least one of these treats may, in fact, be closer to reality than you think.
According to The Telegraph, scientists have just about figured out a way to recreate the soup, entree, and dessert flavored gum, albeit without the blueberry-morphing side effect.
Using microscopic capsules--the same ones that can deliver time-released medicine into our systems--researchers at the Institute of Food Research in Norwich think they might be onto something. Certain tomato-soup flavored capsules could dissolve at the first touch of saliva. Other, slightly tougher capsules, containing roast beef flavoring, could dissolve after a short amount of chewing. The blueberry pie flavor would be encased in the toughest capsules, and would release after significant chewing, thus allowing for a ripple-effect of flavors, or a three-course meal.
There's no word on if, or even when, this sort of treat would be available to the public, but it's pretty cool that the technology exists, and that there are people imaginitive enough to put it to use this way.
now if they could only invent bachelor chow, like on futurama. certain people we know would never need to leave the house again. :)
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