You want to have control of the information.

Exactly. I don’t make a salary at Cantu Designs, and all my profits go to charity.

Do you have a favorite cause?

Food for developing nations. That is another [challenge] that we’re working on with our large-scale food replicator, which has a lot of similarities to our edible advertising line.

Edible advertising?

OK, so you open up a magazine, you see maybe a four-inch square, plastic, tip-in insert, and you pop it open, and you eat it. One that we had submitted to a major magazine, one along the lines of three million in circulation in the U.S. alone, was a picture of a pound cake, but the pound cake only weighed 15 ounces. The advertisement said, “A pound of innovation is worth its weight in gold.” [The ad] was actually formulated from an all-natural pound cake.

We can get very crazy with it. We can do pop-up ads that taste like something. We can do mailers. We can drop things from helicopters. All sorts of cool stuff going on.

How might that same technology benefit developing nations?

You take a can of Campbell’s soup, you shrink it down. You put it inside a box that would normally fit eight reams of paper. You’ve got 2,000 cans of soup in there. You drop off water. You drop off the paper. And you’re good to go.

And on top of that, the paper is constructed from all-natural, sustainable ingredients versus real wood paper, which utilizes chemicals and dyes. So if you decide not to eat this thing, you just throw it back into the ground. It’s not hurting anything.

What kind of shelf life would these products have as food?

Right now, we’ve got it up to nine months, depending on the packaging and what technique we used.

What makes you so passionate about these innovations and the ideas behind them?

I didn’t grow up in very wealthy family. I moved around a lot as a kid. Moving around as a kid has its advantages where you get to see different demographics. You can see, from the low end to the high end, what’s important in life. The most important thing in life, as we know it, is food. Those that don’t have food need to be brought up to our level.

Another startling fact is that we’ve only been here roughly 60,000 years, according to the National Geographic Genome Project. Sixty thousand years ago we were a 2,000-person tribe in Africa. Everyone says, “Oh, you have to eat indigenous foods. That’s how we’re going to live longer.” Well, I’m sorry that’s just not true because if we go back to the exact location where we existed from there is no food there. We exhausted those resources, we exhausted the food.

We’re now in a different world. We have to create new foods. We have to fill that vacuum, that knowledge, and that basic need vacuum because in about 10 years we’re going to be a population of 9.4 billion. Right now we’re at 6.4 billion. If we continue that rate of growth and we don’t find more creative ways to feed ourselves, the whole thing is going to collapse.

The fishing industry is going to collapse. It’s probably going to be one of the first industries. We have 154 dead zones where we can’t fish along our coasts, and that’s worldwide.

The clock is ticking. We just need to get these things done and make them open source so we can all utilize them and improve on them and not make it so scary.

What other projects are in the hopper for Cantu Designs?

Food ideation, food product development, everything from advertising to the marketing world. Yeah, I’m a busy guy.