Edible Bowls! (And Inedible Edible-Bowl Makers!)

The year is 2015, and America is in an advanced state of gluttony. We pin articles about "clean eating," "paleo" and other finger-wagging diet ideas, but at the same time, we're shoveling food-based garbage into our bodies like never before! Food is the quickest and cheapest way to reduce stress and kick up your serotonin, after all.

We've brownied our ice cream and ice-creamed our brownies in an attempt to cajole more chemicals from our brains, but then we have to wash the food dribbles and chunks out of ceramic dinnerware, which is a real buzzkill. No longer! I bring you the true frontier of comfort dining: Bowls you can eat!

It all started with the humble bread bowl. It's a loaf of bread with the top cut out, jack-o-lantern style, that's used to hold stewed meat and vegetables. These have been made for hundreds of years, a way for peasants to combine stale bread with cheap fillings, and survive to the present day. Of course, in this millennium, they're served mostly out of a desire to combine bread-based death with thousands of calories of clam chowder or other energy-dense liquids.

Is a tortilla that bad for you, nutritionally? No, it's not, as long as you don't cup it and fill it with a football-sized lump of other food. And then have a second one. Because, unless you eat a ton of tortilla bowls, you have no need for a tortilla-bowl maker. The full scope of this should be dawning on you now: There are people in the world who have committed hardware for eating the bowls they fill with food.

Surely it's no surprise, then, that you can buy an appliance into which you pour liquid carbs, and pull out a bowl that's made of a waffle. Now, if you look up "waffle bowl" you'll see tiny, cute desserts made of a half-scoop of ice cream with a raspberry stuck on top. This is not the real world of waffle bowls. Dig deeper into the diabetic underbelly of the Web, and you'll see the true purpose of waffle bowls: Users fill them with syrup, drink the syrup, and then crunch the bowl. Meanwhile, two more waffle bowls cook in the waffle-bowl maker.

Cookie bowl? At this point, why not? Adding a few chocolate chips to the starch-borne horror pays homage to the Aztecs, who loved chocolate, and would probably have loved these too, mostly because cookie bowls slowly murder Europeans.

Ice bowl? Zero calories?! Pass. Nope. Not for me.

It's total. It's eatable. We call it Crunchy Salad.

Finally! A bowl made of the most epic ingredient ever - bacon! It's lame that the fat drains off when you 'wave it, though, so you might want to go for the STUFZ burger press instead.

You make brownie bowls in this mold, which you pull out, and, according to the maker, decorate with Miracle Whip and fresh berries. You definitely, no way, ever fill one with sprinkles and peanuts, and put a second brownie bowl on top, and whisper "Now that's the real Gamer Fuel."

Drew Fairweather is the author of three daily sites: The Worst Things for Sale, Toothpaste for Dinner, and Married to the Sea.

– Drew Fairweather (@drewtoothpaste)