A model of the product was unveiled Wednesday in Beijing. Baidu 
 
 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. 
 
 In recent years, China has been rocked with scandals involving everything from toxic milk to glow-in-the-dark pork. Earlier this month, a cook at a hotel in the tourist town of Hangzhou was put on trial for painting food with “inedible pigment” to make it look more appealing. 
 
 According to Baidu, the chopsticks measure the freshness of cooking oil. The chopsticks also will be able to measure PH levels and temperature and calories. 
 
 A price tag for the chopsticks hasn’t yet been announced, and the company said the product isn’t yet ready for mass production. 
 
 Baidu has mimicked products previously pioneered by Google, including its own homegrown answers to Google Glass and Google’s driverless cars. But in inventing the “smart chopstick,” there’s no doubt it has produced a product with decidedly Chinese characteristics. 
 
 – Yang Jie 

 From recycled cooking oil to fox meat and chemicals, a litany of food scandals have turned Chinese diners' stomachs, but a new "smart chopsticks" concept by Internet search giant Baidu could put the answer in their hands. 
 
 The device, which the firm says can tell consumers whether the food in front of them is safe to eat, was born of an April Fool's video, a spokesman said Thursday. 
 
 Baidu at the time had "no serious intention of actually pursuing this", the spokesman told AFP of the stunt it released earlier this year. "But it generated a lot of excitement both internally and externally." 
 
 The latest stage of development was revealed this week, with a new video released by the company showing a user placing the electronic chopsticks in three different cups of cooking oil. 
 
 Sensors in the implements detect the oil's temperature and its fitness for consumption, with the findings displayed on a smartphone app. 
 
 The chopsticks flash a red light when cooking oil has a higher than 25 percent level of TPMs, or total polar materials, an indicator of freshness, the spokesman said. 
 
 Poor food safety is a major concern in China, with one of the country's worst food scandals seeing the industrial chemical melamine illegally added to dairy products in 2008, killing six children and making 300,000 people ill. 
 
 "Gutter oil" is a particular concern -- cooking oil illegally made by reprocessing waste oil or by dredging up leftovers from restaurants and marketing it as new. 
 
 Health authorities last year launched a crackdown on the use and manufacture of such oil, with more than 100 people arrested and 20 imprisoned -- two of them for life -- as part of the campaign. 
 
 It was not clear whether the "smart chopsticks" would go into commercial production. The company has only made a limited run of prototypes, the spokesman said, and no release date or price has been set. 
 
 China's social media users lauded the company's innovation Thursday, but lamented the need for the device in the first place. 
 
 "Is it really a good thing that they invented these?" wrote one user. "Can we still enjoy our food?" 
 
 "If I carried these chopsticks around with me everywhere, I think I'd die of hunger," wrote another. 
 
 fms/slb/jah
– In a country with as many tainted food scandals as China, using "smart chopsticks" could be a pretty wise move. Baidu, the Internet giant nicknamed "China's Google," unveiled the utensils at its annual conference in Beijing this week, explaining that they could detect tainted products like the recycled "gutter oil" sometimes used for cooking, the Wall Street Journal reports. The chopsticks, which Baidu says aren't ready for mass production yet, are capable of connecting to smartphones. The company says the chopsticks can also measure heat, freshness, and sodium content, reports the BBC. "Chopsticks are the embodiment of Chinese wisdom," a Baidu exec told the conference. "And we have combined it with our advanced technology." If the invention sounds a bit like an April Fool's joke, that's because it was: A Baidu spokesman tells AFP that the utensils started out as a joke that the company had no plan of pursuing, but they went into development after the April Fool's video "generated a lot of excitement both internally and externally." (Another smart utensil is on the market in the US—an electronic fork that zaps overeaters.)