diet chocolate

Le Whif - The Future of Chocolate is Calorie-Free

Filed under: Dining

Le Whif is the very first inhalable food source available to the commercial market. Created by Harvard professor David Edwards who pioneered inhalable insulin, Le Whif comes in four flavors: pure chocolate, raspberry chocolate, mint chocolate and coffee. Every whif is virtually calorie-free. A small pack of 8-10 whifs of chocolate contains less than one calorie, and the coffee contains the equivalent of a shot of espresso. The product is already available in France and Japan -- where it has garnered a huge following.

Le Whif comes in a small, lipstick-sized, biodegradable tube and can be purchased in a pack suggesting a smoking alternative. You put the tube in your mouth and inhale, and the taste and feeling of chocolate assaults your taste buds.

We chatted with inventor David Edwards (right) about his invention the Le Whif launch party at Dylan's Candy Bar this week.

Luxist: So, how'd you get the idea for breathable chocolate?

David Edwards: I was having lunch with a friend of mine, who's a French chef, about two and a half years ago, and we were thinking of doing an art project -- I run an art and design center in Paris -- and I was worried about what we would do, trying to think up new ideas for that art exhibit. My background as a scientist has been in developing new kinds of drugs and vaccines that you could breath, so I asked him whether he thought it would be a good idea to breathe food. And he thought that would be an interesting idea.

L: I hear you did breathable insulin before.

DE: I did insulin, a TB vaccine and so forth. So, anyway, I brought the idea to Harvard University and asked the students to think about it, and we took it to that exhibit, and it has just evolved from there.

L: I told a couple of friends that I was coming to this, and they thought smelling chocolate and not eating it sounded like torture. What would you say to them?

DE: Well, you don't smell it, actually, you whif it. It's not something you take through the nose, you put it in your mouth. You breathe it. So, it's not sniffing it, it's whifing it -- with one "f" -- we sort of invented a new word, there. It's neither eating nor breathing, but something in between, and we call that whifing. It's a new way to put food in your mouth without having to touch it or put a fork into it. It's like the next thing after the fork. What's interesting from the chocolate point of view is, all the flavor is 100 percent organic chocolate. It is real chocolate, and it has essentially no calories. It's such a dusting of chocolate that you don't have the calories. So, it's a great snack and it's light, obviously.

Tags: calorie free, Chocolate, David Edwards, diet chocolate, harvard, inhalable chocolate, Le Whif, no calorie chocolate