Eating by breathing

It was the summer of 2007, and the citizens of Paris were pissed.

Cigarettes, which had already been banned in public places, would soon be forbidden in the city's iconic cafés. And yet to David Edwards, a Harvard professor and biomedical engineer who lived part of the year in France, the mass frustration was something else: a source of inspiration.

Edwards had spent much of his career working on the development of aerosol medications, shrinking the size of drug particles to make inhalable remedies possible. But he was also a newly passionate foodie who'd become interested in molecular gastronomy, how chefs were using chemical engineering to alter food forms.

To Parisians, eating and smoking were basic human rights, the first rarely occurring without the second. That custom would be all but destroyed by the smoking ban, though, and that got Edwards thinking. What if you could replicate the Parisians' post-meal ritual with something else, something that would meld culinary art and science, something that would be—unlike other beloved French vices—good for you?

What if he could, in fact, find a way to eat just by breathing?

Read the full article in Boston Magazine