Whenever people talk about developing a circular economy, the role of design is heavily referenced in terms of ‘designing out waste’. Two industrial product designers in Austria are attempting to build a portfolio on just that. What’s more, they are turning the waste into something entirely edible.

What? Edible for us to eat? Indeed. Ignited by research that showed that fungi can degrade toxic and persistent waste materials such as plastics into fungal biomass, and spurred on by the desire to address global food shortages and the mounting waste plastic predicament, Livin Studio designers Katharina Unger and Julia Kaisinger have worked with Utrecht University to create Fungi Mutarium, a futuristic container for producing a food product they’ve named ‘FU’.

According to the designers, their role was to “take a lot of notes, pictures and videos, do a lot of experiments and, most of all, ask a lot of questions that seemed just strange to the scientists”, but what they’ve done is turn two problems on their heads to produce one solution.

The study that first piqued the designers’ interest was conducted by the Department of Microbiology of the Federal University of Vicosa in Brazil in 2013. It found that the ubiquitous and nutritious fungi Schizophyllum commune (known as split gill) and Pleurotus ostreatus (oyster mushrooms) can degrade oxo-biodegradable plastics (ones that degrade by oxidation, hastened by chemical additives) as they grow, using this plastic as substrate. Unger and Kaisinger wanted to take the concept further and used both oxo-biodegradable and PET sheets in their research. “As the fungi break down the plastic ingredients and don’t store them, like they do with metals, they are still edible”, says Unger. “We wanted to create a vision of how novel fungi food could be grown and eaten and how all of this would look.”

It all sounds a bit sci-fi, but a lot of research is currently being undertaken on using fungi for degradation (and if you’re feeling queasy right now, you’re not alone). The designers’ vision of the growing tool for ‘FU’, the ‘Mutarium’, certainly looks futuristic, but it’s also beautifully simple:

“A huge part of our research and design work was about [making] the fungal material consumable as human food. In the laboratory, a lot of fungi cultures are grown on agar plates – a vegetarian, algae-based form of gelatin – mixed with glucose, so we chose to form the agar into egg shapes we called ‘FU’ that can hold plastic but look like fungi.”

The process begins with sterilising the plastic with UV light in the bottom of the Mutarium. This also kicks off the degradation process. The FU is placed in the Mutarium’s Growth Sphere – domed to efficiently distribute heat and humidity. The sterilised plastic is then placed into the FU and the ‘Macerate’ – the fungi roots, not the bodies (as this is the propagating part of a fungus and grows in masses of thread-like structures in nutrient solution) – are extracted with a pipette from the liquid ‘Nursery’ (situated on the other side of the table) and then dropped into the FUs to ignite the growing process.

It takes just one and a half weeks for the mycelium to colonise the agar inside and out, although currently full plastic digestion can take ‘several months’. Unger says that ongoing research aims to cut this time, though, so that the FUs can be harvested and eaten more quickly. “Pleurotus varies from very mild to very strong, sometimes described as sweet with the smell of anise or liquorice. Texture and flavour depend a lot on the strain”, explains Unger. “Schizophyllum is known to have a rather tough texture... but we found the taste to be rather neutral.”

And it’s as simple as that. The resulting ‘food’ cups (pictured above) look quite appealing in a Willy Wonka sort of a way. They can even be ‘flavoured’. And the designers have provided recipes with their research that puts the FU at the centre of haute cuisine, pairing a lime-flavoured FU with caviar and sautéed cabbage in one and describing a ‘yoghurt bleeding chocolate FU with peachy crown’ in another. (They’ve even created silver FU cutlery to enhance the dining experience!)

The designers hope that the research can be used to show that ‘growing food from toxic waste is a provocative, but not an unrealistic, proposal’. “We imagined it as being used with a community or small farm setting”, Unger says. “Our setup with the two domes being placed in a table-like structure is more of a presentation setup. The domes can be separated, so that they can be easily replicated and placed on a shelf to be grown in masses.”

They have created something aesthetically pleasing, but I suspect it will take more research before people believe the fungi renders the plastic inert and there isn’t a ‘plastic note’ on your palette. It’s certainly food for thought, though. And if you’re a fan of entomophagy (that’s eating insects, by the way), it’s worth reading about the designers’ plan for revolutionising insect dining in our own kitchens. You never know, you might be hearing “FU and chips and a side order of flies” in a restaurant near you in the not too distant future!