It is true. You can print food now.
NASA paid to develop a prototype 3D printer for food, so astronauts may one day enjoy 3D-printed pizza on Mars. NASA hopes the technology may one day be used to feed astronauts on longer space missions, such as the roughly 520 days required for a manned flight to Mars. Manned missions to destinations deeper in the solar system would require food that can last an even longer amount of time.
Dividing the various components of food in powder cartridges would theoretically enable users to mix them together, like the ingredients in normal recipes, to create a diverse array of nutritious meals.To prove his idea works, Contractor printed chocolate. Now, he’s aiming to build a more advanced prototype to print a pizza, according to Quartz.
The system will start by “printing” a sheet of dough, followed by a layer of tomato “sauce,” which will consist of the powder mixed with water and oil. Instead of traditional toppings, the 3D-printed pizza will be finished off with a layer of protein, which can be derived from animals, milk or plants, Contractor told Quartz.
While NASA sees applications for 3D printers on future manned space missions, Contractor said his food synthesizer could also be an effective way of addressing the problem of food shortages from rapid population growth.
I guess 3D printed food is not only useful for the astronauts in space, it is useful for the ordinary people during food shortages on earth and probably it is the ultimate food for new busy and lazy future generation.
3D printed food will definitely be nutritious and healthy. But what about taste? Will the printer be able to print taste?
Oh, food!
I coulda sworn it said “foot” …
Taste? That’ll be done by the Gourmet 3D printer, cost approximately $30billion extra taxpayers dollars. Or a small bottle of all spice, cost $3.
Wasn’t this an episode on “Better off Ted”? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1402241/
3D printed food will definitely be nutritious and healthy.
According to the people selling it, anyhow…
Very aptly put Pierce. I suspect it will be yet another techno-idiocy peddled by the capitalist class. And levae out toxins, pollution, waste and what not just like other techno-idiocies.
It’s chocolate. Of course it’ll be tasty.
Taslima, have you watched Star Trek? They have food replicators (essentially what this blog post is about).
Also, the Star Trek series (not the new movies) deal with humans traveling around the galaxy to other planets and interacting with intelligent life. It also exposes things like religion. For example, if you visit a primitive civilization living in the Stone Age and you fire a bunch of laser guns with them, they will think of you as a god and worship you.
I figured you’d be interested in Star Trek for that reason, because it sort of leads us to the question of where religion came from and why it controls our lives so strongly.
No. Those fictional replicators purportedly take raw materials and a pattern for organising them and thus synthesise food; the example at hand takes food materials and combines them — there is no synthesis.
It’s only a matter of time before the technology develops into something that takes raw materials and brings out gourmet masterpieces.
Remember the dot matrix printers? And daisy wheels? Compare those to printers of today. It’s not that far off to think about.
Fair enough; I cannot deny that this is a way-point on the road to the Star Trek food replicator.
I was gonna say, this technology sounds alot like replicators in Star Trek. 🙂
…because distributing all the ingredients and a printer to put the ingredients together in a limited set of ways (assuming everyone even has access to electricity) is easier than just distributing the ingredients and letting people cook? I’m not sure how his thinking goes with this.
I think the idea is to take unpalatable but nutritious ingredients and turn them into something someone would want to eat.
For example, you could take your own shit and make it look and taste like Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Which probably explains Kentucky Fried Chicken.
That is of course the first principle of farming.
> fertiliser > feed crop > chickens > KFC > fertiliser >
A clever machine could shorten the process. Just needs cheap energy.
Reminds me of pink slime. People found it tasty until they didn’t know about it. Anything hyped by TPTB ultimately turns out to be shitty. I will just sit back and wait for it to unravel.
My bad ! Correction ….. I mean to say “People found it tasty until they came to know about it”.
Talking about 3d printing and its usages in varied scenarios, see this:
http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/23/doctors-3d-print-an-emergency-airway-tube-to-save-a-childs-life/
Doctors 3D-Print An Emergency Airway Tube To Save A Child’s Life….Fascinating stuff!
I can’t figure out how you say the printed food can be nutritious and healthy. To me it seems what comes out is not real food but “food-like substance” as Michael Pollan would say. Millions have been spent on “researching” taste and so I have no doubt that the fake food will be tasty – you don’t have to look farther than fast food industry for this – to make shit taste good. Pink slime tasted so good (or atleast people didn’t find anything fishy – no pun intended) until people came to know what really makes it up. So my question is : sure, printed food will taste good, but will it be really nutritious and health?
“Nutritious and healthy” gunk?
Having read The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy I suspect this will be like the nutro-matic machine claiming to be able to copy any food or drink in the Galaxy (using the slogan “share and enjoy”) while the actual product was invariably foul. Producing *good-tasting* tea required the entire computer capacity of the spaceship for ten minutes.