But the challenge in developing any new food is in making something that consumers are comfortable with. There's little that people are more cautious about that what they eat, says Max Elder, a researcher at the Institute for the Future. "People don't want to eat science, they want to eat natural foods," he believes.
Yeah but they're idiots. Chemistry is chemistry wherever it comes from. Make it tasty and/or cheap and they'll eat it. The natural food craze is one that dominates a certain brand of underprivileged morons. However :
But that said, he believes future food designers may have success if they can develop foodstuffs that are what he calls "hyper-individualised" - crafted to give a specific person the exact nutritional content they need. No more, no less.
Now that would be more interesting.
Dutch company ByFlow has come up with a 3D printer that prints food replicator. Their model starts at 3,300 euros (£2,940) and the firm has already sold more than 100 of them, including many to professional restaurant kitchens.
Awesome !
The printer is loaded with cartridges full of edible pastes than can be designed to set when extruded, says ByFlow's Milena Adamczewska. It will print a carrot by using beetroot paste, for example.
Just guessing here, but couldn't it use, say, carrot instead ?
But taking the concept forward a step or two, imagine people in the near future using a 3D printer to produce meals with exactly the right calorie, fat, protein and vitamin content right for them. The role for a food designer here would be to create ways of tailoring consumables to each and every user - and finding ways of making extruded foodstuffs appetising once arranged together.
"Imagine that the cartridge is loaded with, let's say, all the nutritional elements that a single person needs," says Ms Adamczewska. It could even lead to a drop in food waste, she suggests, if people find it easier to purchase only the food they need to eat.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43259905
The kind of restaurants who buy 3D food printers are not the kind of restaurants to make a carrot out of anything so prosaic as an actual carrot. I say that with no kind of judgement, because I'm the kind of person who goes to that kind of restaurant.
ReplyDeleteIs it a free-range lab or a battery lab?
ReplyDeleteSure, and it would taste exactly the same if it were served in a posh restaurant as it would in a burning dumpster. The only difference would be the ambiance.
ReplyDelete