Have you ever heard someone say, ‘Wow, I just inhaled that!’ after eating something in short order? Well, now there’s a new product that lets you literally do just that—with chocolate, no less. It enables you to enjoy the intoxicating experience of chocolate by merely inhaling—and it’s calorie free!
Called Le Whif, it’s an inhaler that‘s comes in four flavors: pure chocolate, mint chocolate, raspberry chocolate, and coffee chocolate. The little tube looks kind of like a lipstick case or a plastic shotgun shell. And it delivers quite a blast of chocolate.
Le Whif is the invention of David Edwards, a Harvard biomedical scientist who usually works on designing inhalers that deliver medicine. Last year Edwards and his lab students decided to experiment with breathable chocolate. They were able to break it down into particles that float, and soon they had an inhaler that delivered aromatic “puffs” of chocolate.
To see if their new invention had appeal, Edward tested it out Francis Cardullo, co-owner of Cardullo’s Gourmet Shop in Harvard Square, which offers an extensive selection of chocolate. ‘That’s a nice whiff of chocolate,’ Cardullo said after sucking in some chocolaty air from Le Whif. ‘You get the full flavor of chocolate.’
As Edwards told NPR’s Andrea Shea, ‘This is just a new way of experiencing chocolate, and it’s sort of an addendum to how we normally eat chocolate.’
You get about eight to ten puffs of chocolate per Whif, using it just like you would any medical inhaler. Just put it in your mouth and breathe in. Le Whif is currently selling well in Paris stores, and will soon be available at Cardullo’s on the Harvard campus and in select retail shops in New York. It’s also available online.
A box of three tubes costs about $8.
Could Le Whif usher in a new wave of products that let us breathe in the flavors we love, while avoiding the calories associated with eating those flavorful foods? Will we eat only nutritious, low-calorie foods and inhale the decadent ones? Could this be the brave new world? Well, probably not. But it’s still interesting to think about.
