Homaro Cantu, a Chicago chef who kept a Class IV laser as a cooking tool and dreamed of eradicating hunger with nutrient-soaked edible paper, was found dead on Tuesday on the city’s North Side. He was 38.

He had hanged himself at a brewery he was building, the Cook County medical examiner’s office said Wednesday. His wife, Katie McGowan, told The Chicago Tribune that she was baffled by his suicide. He did not leave a note, she said, and he had no history of depression or mental illness.

Mr. Cantu, the chef at the acclaimed Chicago restaurant Moto, was among a small vanguard of American chefs who used chemical-laboratory techniques to coax food into novel and sometimes peculiar new forms.

He had worked for four years in the kitchen of another noted Chicago restaurant, Charlie Trotter, when Moto hired him to be its first chef. He had impressed the owner by cooking fish at the table in a small polymer box (essentially a miniature transparent oven), among other feats.

Moto has held a Michelin star since 2012. Mr. Cantu eventually took over most of the ownership.

In his early days at the restaurant, when it served synthetic champagne squirted into a glass by a large black medical syringe, Mr. Cantu seemed as if he was out to shock. As time went by, though, critics and diners began to pay more attention to the quality of his cooking as well.

“A 20-course tasting menu can begin with ‘sushi’ made of paper that has been printed with images of maki and wrapped around vinegared rice and conclude with a mint-flavored picture of a candy cane,” said a 2005 profilein The New York Times Magazine. “Should you fail to finish a course,” it went on, Mr. Cantu “will emerge from the kitchen with a refund: a phony dollar bill flavored to taste like a cheeseburger and fries. It may sound like some sort of Surrealist stunt with dire intestinal consequences, but here’s the rub: The ‘food’ tastes good. Good enough to lure diners back at $240 per head (including wine).”

Mr. Cantu filed six kitchen-related patent applications over the years for various items, from an innovative utensil to the polymer box, all revealing a serious purpose to his fascination with gadgets.

Customers might have giggled as they ate a picture of a cow that tasted like filet mignon, but Mr. Cantu said in interviews that his technology for flavoring and fortifying edible paper could help feed soldiers at war, astronauts in space and people in refugee camps.

“My goal with this is to deliver food to the masses that are starving,” he said in an interview with the magazine Fast Company. “We give them something that’s healthy, that has an indefinite shelf life, and that is supercheap to produce.”

In 2010, as co-host of the Discovery Channel’s Planet Green television series “Future Food,” Mr. Cantu survived for a week eating only miracle berries and weeds, leaves and grass that he scavenged from his backyard.

Born in Tacoma, Wash., on Sept. 23, 1976, Mr. Cantu was homeless from age 6 to age 9. He traced his interest in helping people through technology and his skills as a chef to that experience. He grew up in Portland, Ore., and graduated from the Western Culinary Institute (now a Le Cordon Bleu School) there.

More recently, his ideas about ending hunger shifted to the miracle fruit, a berry that temporarily makes sour or bitter foods taste sweet. He called this “flavor tripping,” and it was the inspiration for another restaurant, iNG, now closed, as well as a coffee shop, Berrista.

Last month Alexander Espalin, an investor in iNG and Moto, sued Mr. Cantu in Cook County Circuit Court. Mr. Espalin, who claimed that he had never received any share of Moto’s profits, charged that Mr. Cantu had misused restaurant funds to promote his own businesses, including a book he had published, “The Miracle Berry Diet Cookbook.”

On her Facebook page, Ms. McGowan, Mr. Cantu’s wife, wrote, “It was just another case of someone trying to make a buck off of him or take credit for his ideas.”

Shortly before the suit was filed, Moto’s pastry chef went to work for another restaurant. Early this month, its executive chef announced that he, too, was leaving.

Last June, The Tribune reported, Mr. Cantu helped start the Trotter Project, in honor of the chef Charlie Trotter, who died in 2013. The effort is aimed at providing culinary and nutritional education, particularly to students and poor neighborhoods.

Mr. Cantu lived in the Old Irving Park neighborhood. Besides his wife, a chef whom he met at Charlie Trotter, his survivors include two young daughters.

Ashley Southall and Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

CREDIT:   PETE WELLS for the New York Times