Baidu’s smart chopsticks sample your meal for food safety scares

He’s not joking: Baidu CEO Robin Li unveils the ‘smart chopsticks’.

Yesterday Chinese search giant Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) showed off its Google Glass rival called Baidu Eye at the company’s annual event. But that gadget had been anticipated for a whole year. However, Baidu’s smart chopsticks came as much more of a surprise.

The smart chopsticks, called Kuaisou, can test food for safety issues. It’s limited to sampling the oil to detect dangerously substandard cooking oil – one of all too many food safety issues plaguing China – but it’s still an interesting and practical tool. There’s a demo video here (unfortunately not embeddable).

A Baidu representative explains to Tech in Asia that the smart chopsticks started out as “something of an April Fool’s prank” within the company earlier this year. There’s not yet a launch date or price-tag for the Kuaisou.

See: Wearable tech made by women for womenThe quality of cooking oil, especially at restaurants, is a concern in China these days. While it’s common for food scraps and old cooking oil to be recycled for other purposes in the country – such as for pig slops – there is evidence that some used oil, referred to in Chinese as “gutter oil”, goes back into the human food supply chain through some unscrupulous merchants. China jailed one man for life last year for making and trafficking gutter oil. Authorities are still scrambling to clamp down on food hazards.

Once Baidu’s Kuaisou are available, we might see people in China carrying them to restaurants.