Cantu's second restaurant, iNG, and his coffee house, Berrista, focused on the use of "miracle berries" to make sour food taste sweet.

Through his media appearances, he advocated for an end to world hunger and thought his edible paper creation and the miracle berry could play a significant role in that goal.

He disassembled the family lawn mower three times to learn how it worked, and his "Christmas gifts would wind up in a million pieces.

[6] At the age of twelve, Cantu was nearly jailed for starting a large fire near his fathers house[4] and began working at a fast food restaurant.

[4] Cantu graduated from the Western Culinary Institute in Portland[7] (later a Le Cordon Bleu School) and spent the next two years staging on the West Coast.

[4] Upon Moto's opening in January 2004, guests were initially confused by the tasting menu's format and content, but the restaurant soon became notable for its experimentation:[4] dishes included carbonated fruit,[9] menus printed on edible paper using a conventional printer filled with edible ink,[10] and fish and bread cooked from the inside out using a class IV laser.

[4] Cantu's second restaurant, iNG, focused on a concept he called "flavor-tripping" – the use of the "miracle berry" to make sour foods taste sweet.

[2] At the time of his death, he was preparing to open a brewery/brewpub called Crooked Fork with his friend and former Moto manager Trevor Rose-Hamblin.

[11] In September 2016, Rose-Hamblin and another of Cantu's associates, Matthias Merges, opened the brewpub, now renamed Old Irving Brewing Company.

[13][14] Cantu was also a prolific inventor, filing more than 100 patent applications, and signing deals with NASA and Whirlpool for use of his inventions.

[4] Cantu also converted Moto's office into a "state-of-the-art indoor farm to grow vegetables – complete with a vortex aerator".

[3] Pete Wells credited Cantu with pioneering the use of intellectual property licensing as a source of income for chefs.

[8] In the episode, Cantu used a laser to caramelize edible packaging material, and liquid nitrogen to create beet (which was the secret ingredient) "balloons," among other innovations.

[2] Following his death in 2015, Director/Producer Brett A. Schwartz of StoryScreen directed and produced a feature-length documentary film called Insatiable: The Homaro Cantu Story (2016).

[18] On Future Food, Cantu demonstrated this idea by spending a week on a diet of miracle berries and common weeds, grass, and leaves he found in his backyard.

[9] In 2013, Cantu founded the Trotter Project, a non-profit aimed at providing culinary education to students in poor neighborhoods.

"[2] Earlier in March, Cantu's pastry chef, Claire Crenshaw, had left Moto to work at another restaurant.

[9] On April 14, 2015, Cantu's body was found hanging inside the building he was renovating into Crooked Fork on the Northwest Side of Chicago.

[20] After an autopsy on April 15, the Cook County medical examiner's office said the cause of death was asphyxiation by hanging and ruled it a suicide.

"[12] Fellow chefs compared Cantu to Salvador Dalí or Willy Wonka; The New York Times called him the Buck Rogers of cuisine "blazing a trail to a space-age culinary frontier.

"[10] A 2005 Fast Company article described Moto as "a temple for science-based gastronomy" and Cantu as "the classic mad scientist, a Stephen Hawking acolyte with a basement filled with gadgets, robots, and gazillions of inventions aching for just a little bit more time and attention.

[23] A Washington Post obituary said that Cantu had "turned cooking into alchemy through his playful and surprising brand of molecular gastronomy".

[23] Following his death in 2015, Director/Producer Brett A. Schwartz of StoryScreen[24] directed and produced a feature-length documentary film called Insatiable: The Homaro Cantu Story[25] (2016).