Before I begin to post some thoughts and basic information in regards to 3D printed food, a topic that I will be covering for the remainder of the spring semester, take a look at this video:

What you have just seen is a machine built by a mechanical engineer by the name of Anjan Contractor whom had won a $125,000 grant from NASA in 2013 to build a experimental 3D printer designed to print food for astronauts.  Now, like most 3D printing related technology and products derived by them in the present, the overall product may not seem too impressive as it seems to be extremely limited in functionality and rather simplistic.  However, 3D technology will undoubtedly advance and grow to become more efficient, effective, and practical as has been seen time-and-time again in a wide variety of instances; computers formerly took up whole rooms and were very limited in functionality, but we all know how far this particular example has evolved over time.

The concept of 3D printed food intrigued me the first time it was hinted at in the book Fabricated by Hod Lipson as the whole notion of printing food on demand in the near future opens up a whole new world of convenience, experimentation, and overall intrigue.  Although my knowledge for the time being is rather limited on the subject I did come across some information regarding the general idea of what is to become of this pizza printing machine.  The plan is to use replaceable powder cartridges as “building blocks” of food which would be combined to produce a variety of foods that can be created by the printer and these cartridges would have a lifespan of 30 years and thus enable long-distance space travel (Souppouris).

http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/21/4350948/nasa-funding-3d-food-printer-pizza

Anjan Contractor does however have broader vision for 3D printed food; “We can pretty much provide food-on-table with very few resources… Let’s say someone is an athlete in the family and they need more protein, we can design recipes for them and print out more protein-nutritious food for that individual and at the same time say someone is pregnant and requiring more iron, we can bring more iron-enriched food.”

http://www.3ders.org/articles/20131009-nasa-funded-3d-food-printer-displayed-at-sxsw-eco.html

My desire and overall goal by researching this topic in 3D printing is to find out how feasible and far from fruition the idea of printed food is to the masses.  What are the limitations on the types of foods that can be printed?  Can the printed foods rival their real counterparts?  How can one replicate the many tastes associated with food?  All these and many more questions to be looked into.  Stay tuned!

Back to the initial video, I need to mention that the finished product looks a lot more appetizing….

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2014 at 9:58 pm and is filed under Food Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.