Baidu’s new chopsticks can analyse your food

Chinese search engine Baidu has just announced a pair of chopsticks that can analyse the contents of your meal. Called Kuaisou, or Chopsticks Search, they’re designed to make people more confident in the quality of the food they eat from restaurants and street vendors. They can detect the quality of oils in the dish, to show whether it’s been contaminated or is safe to eat. They can even measure calories, PH content, and nutritional information.

The company’s CEO Robin Li gave a presentation yesterday at the Baidu World conference where he showed off a fully-functioning pair in a video demonstration. They’re linked to a mobile app which displays the result of the sticks’ analysis.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, China has had some shocking food scandals over the last decade, from ‘gutter oil’ (sourced from restaurant fryers, sewers, or by cooking leftover animal fat), to glow-in-the-dark pork and rat meat sold as lamb. Baidu hopes that Kuaisou will encourage cooks to use better quality produce in future.

They’re still some way from being mass produced, so there are no details on when they might make it to market, how much they’ll cost when they do, or if we’ll ever see them over here. But given some of the scandals associated with traditional British dinners, from mad cow to unexpected horsemeat, the UK government might want to find out if the design could also come in a fork…

Image credit: Baidu.

Diane Shipley