One scoop of vanilla ice cream with a side of plastic, please. A U.K. designer has crafted what she claims to be the first ice cream with vanilla flavoring sourced from recycled plastic, tasting just like regular vanilla ice cream.
As part of her final-year project at Central Saint Martins Design School, Eleonora Ortolani decided to create something that, to her knowledge, no one else has attempted. The project, titled Guilty Flavours, was simple: use a small amount of plastic to make ice cream flavoring.
Ortolani opted for this project because she has long been frustrated by how plastic is generally recycled: being made into products that couldn’t be recycled any further. This is often due to the plastic being missed with resins or other materials.
“I would have never imagined that I would actually be able to make food from plastic,” Ortolani said. “And it was difficult for me to find a scientist to actually be interested in working with me on that.”
Eleonora Ortolani partnered with London Metropolitan University food scientist and researcher Joanna Sadler from the University of Edinburgh who helped her synthesize synthetic vanillin from plastic. The common food flavoring is often sold in supermarkets and used as a cheaper alternative to vanilla but it is produced from the same raw material as plastic: crude oil.
All the pair needed was one enzyme to break down the super-strong bonds between molecules in the structure of plastic while another is used to synthesize the molecules into vanillin. The resulting substance apparently smells just like vanillin, which Ortolani or anyone else has actually tasted.
Since this is a world’s first and is considered a new ingredient by food safety bodies, no one is allowed to actually consume the ice cream until it’s studied and deemed safe for consumption. The first vanilla ice cream flavored with plastic-synthesized vanillin is currently locked in a fridge and on display at Central Saint Martins.
“If I tell you ‘there’s an ingredient in that ice cream coming from plastic waste,’ you’re going to be completely disgusted by it,” said Ortolani. “But then once you understand that basically everything is part of the same ecosystem and we can even consider plastic part of the same ecosystem, then it makes total sense.
“We drastically have to change the way we eat and the way we perceive food. I’m not saying we have to look at the future of food as everything being synthetic or super-processed, but it’s just a matter of compromise for me.”
Source: https://youtu.be/FJQrACbItzo