Chinese street food can be paradise for the adventurous eater, but it can also be quite bad for your health if you patronize a stand that has questionable hygiene or cooking practices. The use of “gutter oil,” or cooking oil that is recycled from waste oil and often linked to food poisoning, is rampant among street vendors. Unfortunately, there is usually no way to know before digging in if your food is made with safe and high-quality ingredients.

Chinese company Baidu is developing smart chopsticks that can help you tell whether the food you’ve just bought is safe to eat or might kill you. The metal tips of the chopsticks go into the food and analyze the contents. If the food is safe, the lights on top will glow blue. If it’s not, the lights will go red and the accompanying app will give you more information on what isn’t quite right about the meal.

Baidu claims the chopsticks, known as Kuaisou, will also be able to measure acidity and sodium levels of the meals they are placed into. While maybe not quite as immediately life-saving as detecting gutter oil, this feature can help you establish a complete nutritional profile to keep you in optimal health.

Although there’s no price or release date yet for the smart chopsticks, the company has revealed that the idea started out as kind of a joke. But with people getting ill and vendors actually going to prison for serving the unsafe gutter oil, they realized that it wasn’t just a silly notion. The company hopes to develop sensors that can accurately detect and measure a number of other ingredients and contaminants in food. It might not make you pass up the less-than-healthy options, but the technology could at least help you avoid the dishes that will definitely cause digestive distress.

The post Safer Savoring: Chopsticks Detect Deadly Contaminated Oil first appeared on Gajitz.

A simple redesign could be the end of soggy delivery pizza forever. The current pizza box design puts a hot pizza in a fully enclosed cardboard box. The steam and resulting moisture are trapped inside, making the crust soft and soggy. There are vent holes in the sides, but steam doesn’t move sideways; it is released from the top and bottom of the pie. Vinay Mehta had a stroke of genius and created a brand new pizza box that will keep your pizza fresh and tasty on its way to you.

Mehta knows his cardboard: he’s been working with it for 35 years. His new box design is called VENTiT. The first prototype was created in 2006 when Mehta got tired of soggy delivery pizzas. He used a pen knife to cut vents in a piece of cardboard and the VENTiT idea was born. It took him five years to get the initial patent for the box, but the design is now patented in over 100 countries.

The main reason that pizza boxes don’t already have vents in their tops and bottoms is the fear of contamination. Mehta’s idea eliminates that worry. He explains that cardboard is composed of three layers: two flat surfaces with a ridged layer in between. The VENTiT simply has cutouts in the two flat surfaces, but the middle layer is intact. Steam can escape through the ridged layer, keeping your pizza hot, fresh, and tasty. The VENTiT requires no additional materials to produce, making this revolutionary idea a realistic alternative to the old pizza box design.

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If you’re a fan of both fast food and ketchup, you have undoubtedly cursed the poor design of the ketchup packet more than once. When you decide to sit down inside the restaurant you may or may not find little plastic or paper cups to put your ketchup in. But when you eat on the go, you have little choice other than squeezing the ketchup out onto a paper napkin. This brilliant invention aims to make the whole process of dipping fries in ketchup a simpler, cleaner one.

The Dipping Cover is a concept developed by Bae Su-kyoo and Noh Haeun. It’s a regular soft drink cup lid with the standard hole for a straw, but it also features an indentation for ketchup in the middle. You simply squeeze your ketchup packet right into this little indentation and you can then carry your sauce with you as you walk around. Life changing design it is not, but it sure could make lunch a lot more pleasant for french fry lovers.

The post Saucy Sidekick: Lid Design Lets You Take Ketchup on the Go first appeared on Gajitz.