Wikicells: Edible skin for ice-cream balls

In a sleek new restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, David Edwards is trying to change the way we take in nutrition.

The Harvard professor, writer, entrepreneur and inventor has created a range of food innovations, from a carafe that will turn your scotch into an inhalable cloud to a device to print smells sent from your iPhone. His best known creation is Wikicells, an edible skin meant to replace traditional food packaging.

With these inventions to his credit, it is hard not to compare him to Willy Wonka. However, Edwards' biggest problem isn't creating these alternatives; it's selling the public on them.

As the solution, he has now started a futuristic café called the Artscience Lab which lets people experience his inventions in an immersive environment. One of his most popular inventions are the little balls of ice-cream encased in Wikicells.

"I began to think about how one can encapsulate food in the way nature encapsulates fruit. You can't take the membrane out of the lemon or off the human body, and so why not the same for a bar of chocolate? It's proposing a fundamental change in how we make, distribute and consume food," Edwards says.