Harvard university experts, working on the concept, have filled an orange membrane with orange juice, a tomatoflavoured enclosure with gazpacho cold spanishportuguese tomatobased raw vegetable soup and grape packages with wine. Biomedical engineer david edwards hopes to create a prototype of the bottle out of wikicells soon. "in the near term, we will be encountering wikicells in restaurant settings as a novelty item," he said. Wikicells is an edible material created from a biodegradable polymer or plastic and food particles.
Essentially, it is an egglike membrane hard shell. It can be filled with a variety of flavours, including orange juice, wine or chocolate. It could form either a layer that you could peel off a bottle or, one day, make the entire container. The product, a membrane created using a biodegradable plastic combined with food particles, could either be peeled off or potentially eaten whole. "people in a village in africa could become plastic bottlefree and make things for themselves
Its really exciting from a humanitarian point of view," says edwards, according to a daily mail report. Edwards, professor at harvard, plans to expand wikicells to speciality stores and supermarts as a novelty item for restaurants. But he hopes to produce a wikicell machine that could allow people, especially in the developing world, to make their own bottles without relying on plastic.