HackingTheUniverse

Transgenic or genetically modified foods are controversial, but offer tremendous opportunity to produce nutritionally enhanced, therapeutic food products that are engineered for specific needs. Combine this with the use of 3D printers to produce food products and you have the possibility to create unlimited combinations of nutrition and taste and texture.

Post Paleo? – [robbwolf.com]

Consider foods precisely tailored to our individual genetic profile, and perfectly reproduced in 3d organic printers. Or even assembled at a cellular level by nanotechnology. And if these ‘printed’ meals were better for us, how many of us would choose to consume them?

… and

In the nearer future we’re supposed to see the coming to market of a second generation of ’transgenic foods‘ (another word for genetically modified). Their composition would be altered, supposedly to promote health benefits. For example, foods with ‘boosted additives’ such as antioxidising agents that are actually bred into the cellular structure of the food, not mixed in later as an additive. Just the way that antioxidants in nature work.

So to take this further, would Mr/Mrs Paleo eat a transgenic, antioxidant enriched bagel that’d been authentically stripped of the lectins, gluten, nasty carbs and whatnot? What if it tasted like chicken? What if it was good for you? What would the point of paleo be then?

Printing Food – [cornell.edu]

Impact in the Home: Injecting Knowledge

The second way that food-SFF could impact laypeople is by abstracting culinary knowledge and injecting it directly into the home. The idea of abstracting knowledge is nothing new. When chefs create new dishes and then write recipes, they are effectively abstracting their knowledge and distilling it into a prescription for others to reproduce their work. Nevertheless, just like the skills a musician needs to effectively play a song from sheet music, a recipe follower still needs non-trivial skills to execute a recipe. It is not only in the abstraction of knowledge, but also in the execution of the prescription that SFF could have tremendous impact. Just as MIDI software can offload musical skill by taking in digital sheet music and directly creating sound, the SFF system could directly inject the skills necessary to follow a recipe end-to-end. Laypeople don’t have to know the first thing about musical notation, valve/key/fret fingering, or tonal theory to be able to utilize a stereo system to deliver a distilled version of a live musical performance directly into their home. Likewise, a layperson would not necessarily need to possess even basic culinary skills to employ an SFF system to create geometrically complex, multi-material food items. Culinary knowledge and artistic skill of world renowned chefs can be abstracted to a 3D fabrication file and then used by laypeople to reproduce famous chefs’ work in the home. Also, expert knowledge of the world’s leading nutritionists can be abstracted and encoded in 3D fabrication files to help laypeople eat more healthily, without necessarily having to learn healthy cooking techniques or even understand nutritional principles such as caloric intake and protein balance. SFF systems could even go one step further, and deliver customized solutions (SFF’s core strength) to each user that incorporate the individualized nature of nutritional needs. For example, a layperson may soon be able to upload a report of their daily activity from a pedometer and digital food log, and the SFF system could use expert knowledge to print them a meal that fulfills their particular nutritional needs for the day. While experts can currently offer advice on how to balance a nutritional program, their influence falls short of delivering the end-to-end solution that only SFF system can provide: from personalized design through fabrication.

MUTLI-MATERIAL FOOD PRINTING WITH COMPLEX INTERNAL STRUCTURE SUITABLE FOR CONVENTIONAL POST-PROCESSINGPrinting Fooda> – [cornell.edu]

SEE ALSO:
Printing Food