These smart-chopsticks are able to detect contaminants in your food

Recently, Stephen Colbert lampooned gadgets that track what you drink and other seemingly inane metrics. But the trend may have just found its ideal market. The Chinese search giant Baidu just introduced a pair of “smart chopsticks” designed to alert users to the presence of “gutter oil,” or the illegal use of oil dredged up unsavory places. The utensils are called Baidu Kuaisou, and according to the Wall Street Journal, they can detect “oils containing unsanitary levels of contamination.”

Don’t trust the safety of your food in China? Baidu says it has the answer. The Chinese search-engine giant on Wednesday rolled out a so-called set of “smart chopsticks,” known as Kuaisou in Chinese, that it says can detect oils containing unsanitary levels of contamination. At the company’s annual technology conference, Baidu CEO Robin Li gave a brief introduction of the new product, which he called “a new way to sense the world.” “In the future, via Baidu Kuaisou, you’ll be able to know the origin of oil and water and other foods–whether they’ve gone bad and what sort of nutrition they contain,” Mr. Li said in a speech Wednesday. A video posted by the company shows how to use the product, which is linked with a smartphone app. In one experiment, the chopsticks were shown being swirled in olive oil, with the smartphone subsequently displaying a “good” reading. In another, the chopsticks registered a “bad” reading after being submerged into recycled cooking oil.