Student works towards creating ice cream that will last for thousands of years, with the hope that future generations will enjoy it.

'Life in plastic, it's fantastic', as the old adage goes. But a British artist is making this more than just a song lyric. Eleonora Ortolani, a student from the London art and design college Central Saint Martins, has created the first food ever made from plastic waste. She's calling it the 'Guilty Flavours'.

This 'vanilla ice cream' is made using vanillin, the extract of the vanilla bean used to make pharmaceuticals and cleaning products. It's much different from the two-floor plastic pink mansion with a swimming pool that Barbie sang about, but it's the next best thing in terms of making a statement about the looming food crisis due to climate change.

Unlike Barbie, Eleonora didn't just go to the store and buy vanilla beans. She enlisted the help of scientists to convert used plastic bottles into vanillin. The mutant enzymes developed by Scottish scientists in 2021 can break down the polyethene terephthalate polymer used in drink bottles into its basic unit, terephthalic acid.

Dr Joanna Sadler, a biotechnologist from the University of Edinburgh, worked with Eleonora on the project. Plastic consists of tough molecules called synthetic polymers, and these mutant enzymes can break them down into smaller molecules that can be converted into vanillin.

Though Eleonora's ice cream is a creative solution, it won't be available in your local grocery store soon. Dr Sadler notes that it is important to take safety seriously and for the product to go through the same regulatory and food standard processes as any other food ingredient.

The world is facing a plastic crisis, with production increasing and the recycling system struggling to keep up. According to the Plastic Atlas Asia Edition, in 1950 only 2,000,000 tons of plastic were produced, whereas by 2021 the amount had swelled to more than 390,000,000. Of the 1,00,000 plastic bottles sold every minute around the world, only 14% are recycled.

Eleonora's 'Guilty Flavours' is a way of highlighting the food crisis, as well as the environmental impacts of plastic buildup. It shows that we have the tools to rethink the food system we are living in, but that it's important to ensure that products are safe before they are made available to consumers.

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