A 3D printer that prints out meals and snacks isn’t a new concept. CandyFab prints candy, and the MIT Fluid Interfaces Group recently released a design for a printer that stores and cooks food. Now Philips has dipped its toe into the embryonic market for 3D food printing with its Food Creation Concept design. The idea is that you can put in your desired ingredients, and the printer makes your meal in whatever shape and texture you want using the influence of molecular gastronomy. Perhaps more importantly, the printer would be able to adjust nutritional value based on electronic input from a sensor that measures your individual needs.
As you can guess, there’s no timetable or projected release date for the printer. It’s just an idea intended to promote discussion and assess consumer interest. What’s interesting to me is that besides Electrolux’s Moléculaire, the Philips Food Creation concept is the only time I’ve seen a major company take food printing seriously. But for all the growing buzz, I wonder why we haven’t seen an actual working prototype yet, despite the fact that we can already print candy.
Of course, as someone whose cooking skills are limited to boiling water and operating a microwave, I figure there’s a good reason that food printers only seem to exist in drawings. One issue may be that the more varied and complex ingredients in regular food are tougher to translate to a 3D printer than the simpler ingredients in candy. Personally, I’d like to see someone start an open source project (if they haven’t already) like CandyFab, Makerbot, or RepRap and let the public develop and refine it on their own. In any case, until the 3D food printer becomes an affordable home kitchen appliance, I guess I’ll have to go out to get a decent meal.
(Story via Wired.com)
