The Water of the Future Might Require Some Chewing

The future is now, and liquids are so 2014.

London’s Skipping Rocks Lab has devised a way to create edible, gelatinous blobs of water that’ll have us doing a lot more chewing than water has typically called for in the past. Has science gone too far?!

Explain yourself science!

The project is called “Ooho!” (I’m guessing the sound you make when you find out your water is jello), and it’s not just science for science’s sake, Skipping Rocks has a pretty good reason to be pursuing this wacky tech.

The project was submitted to the 2015 “Design to Improve Life” competition, and its creators hope that the blobs will help to cut down on the plastic pollution caused by water bottles.

Here’s their explanation (awkward grammar theirs, they’re scientists, not writers after all):

When we drink bottled water we throw away plastic, [and] 80% of the bottles are not recycled….. Ooho! uses the culinary technique of sphereification, the water is encapsulated in a double gelatinous membrane. The technique consist into apply sodium alginate (E-401) from the brown algae and calcium chloride (E-509) in a concrete proportions in order to generate a gelification on the exterior of the liquid. The final package is simple, cheap (2ct/unit), resistant, hygienic, biodegradable and even eatable. Ooho! is licensed as creative commons so everyone could make them at their kitchen, modifying and innovating the “recipe.”