Quote: Soon, You Will Be Able to Print Your Food
Scientists at Cornell University's Computational Synthesis Lab are developing a commercially-available "3D food printer" that would allow users to "print" meals using "raw food 'inks'" inside syringes. Sounds delicious!
Cooking is so hard, what with "ingredients" and "recipes" and "having to leave your house to go shopping." So thank goodness for the fab@home project, an open-source collaboration on 3D printer technology that's developing a "food printer" intended for home use. The BBC is very excited:
Just pop the raw food "inks" in the top, load the recipe - or 'FabApp' - and the machine would do the rest.
"FabApps would allow you to tweak your foods taste, texture and other properties," says Dr Jeffrey Ian Lipton, who leads the project.
"Maybe you really love biscuits, but want them extra flaky. You would change the slider and the recipe and the instructions would adjust accordingly."
Currently, the food printer's "inks" are limited to "anything that can be extruded from a syringe" (luckily that includes the four major food groups: Liquid chocolate, liquid cookie dough, liquid cheese, and liquid cake batter). But the team is working on turning other ingredients into syringe-extrudable materials—and they've had some successes, like cookies, and chocolate, and, oh my God, "designer domes made of turkey meat."
And there's nothing weird about that at all! No, nothing completely and utterly horrifying about the fact that the endpoint of technological modernity is our food being squeezed out of a syringe in prearranged patterns. If anything, this will improve The Food Experience, according to chef Homaro Cantu of Chicago's Moto, who has, and you may want to get a vomit bag here, "printed sushi using an ink jet printer":
Long-term, the team believes that people will take to the technology by creating their own 3D printable food recipe social networks with everyone improving on each other's creations.
"3D printing will do for food what e-mail and instant messaging did for communication," says Mr Cantu.
3D printable food recipe social networks doing for food what email and IMing did for communication? Say no more! Bring it on, future! "Turkey and celery square anyone?" I'll have six.
perfect headline...
it worked well because it played deadpan to the unexpected writing voice in the article...
great snapshot exposing the delusions that create a "cooking" movement based around "molecular gastronomy."
Think about it. Instead of going to the grocer, we could all hook up to the "Food Utility". We could have hookups for electricity, water, gas and... meat
Quote:This week Natural Machines, a Barcelona-based company, announced it had overcome the greatest challenge to making homemade pizza: shaping the dough and applying an even layer of sauce.
How'd they do it? With Foodini, a 3-D food printer the company hopes will bring food-printing technology into the home.
Natural Machines created the perfectly round pizza with its uniform layer of sauce by designing a blueprint for the pizza and then sending a print command to Foodini.
The device printed the dough from a food syringe, adding line after line of dough and then line after line of sauce. Natural Machines staff added cheese and spices by hand before baking the pie.
The company has printed a variety of food, including ravioli, burgers, rolls, cookies and pumpkin gnocchi.
Natural Machines isn't the only company developing such a printer. Cornell University's Computational Synthesis Lab has been developing the FabApp, a commercial 3-D food printer that will enable users to download recipes and print meals using raw-food ink syringes.
Just like a regular printer, the FabApp would work at the touch of a button and print the desired number of copies.
"FabApps would allow you to tweak your food's taste, texture and other properties," Dr. Jeffrey Ian Lipton, the lead on the Cornell project, told BBC. "Maybe you really love biscuits, but want them extra flaky. You would change the slider and the recipe and the instructions would adjust accordingly."
While the Foodini and the FabApp are designed for commercial use, other 3-D-food printing technology is being developed to feed astronauts during long space missions.
NASA awarded $125,000 to Texas-based Systems and Materials Research Consultancy in May to study how to make efficient and nutritious space food with a 3-D printer.
SMRC engineers envision a system that will print meals using layers of food powders that will have a shelf life of 30 years.
I see a day coming when I can order a hamburger from a fast food franchise outlet, and on the top of this burger a layer of edible liquid crystals, powered by surrounding EM activity, will connect me to the Internet so I can eat and browse at the same time.
I wouldn't eat such a monstrosity, mind you, but I sure as hell had better be able to.
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