Institute For The Future

What Are You Printing for Dinner?

 

An early design prototype called Cornucopia is aimed at bringing 3-D printing into the kitchen. Cornucopia moves beyond the intriguing, though commercially unproven concept of printing flavors onto raw ingredients in a home kitchen to layering ingredients in three dimensions--"a one thousandth of a millimeter layer of butter, followed by the same sized layer of bread, followed by butter," as one of Corncucopia's designers puts it--effectively giving an owner of the machine the ability to print precisely designed and cooked foods without any work or clean up inside the kitchen. Under development by MIT Fluid Interfaces Group researchers Marcelo Coelho and Amit Zoran, some of the design specs for Cornucopia are being withheld until the group receives patent approval for the machine. But according to the Times, UK:

 

 

 

The early concept for Cornucopia is a machine that looks like a microwave, but with canisters of ingredients on top and a cooking chamber underneath. The canisters refrigerate and store ingredients. These would be piped into a mixer, which would combine ingredients, and then pump it into the Cornucopia’s chamber through a funnel-shaped “printer head”. That head would also have a series of tubes to heat and cool the food.

 

The most immediate and profound impacts of Cornucopia or something similar would be in the intersection of food and health. Calorie counters, for example could get a recipe from a weight loss program, print it to some exact specifications, and be done. And if nutrigenomics ever lives up to its promise, it's easy to imagine how a tool like this would enable a busy parent to serve a tasty, dinner customized to each family member's genetics and biology night after night, doing a minimum of work. Such a level of customization sounds impressive, though it also would seem to dramatically curtail how we engage with our food choices. Interestingly, Coelho says he thinks the device will help people engage with their food choices and actually encourage--rather than discourage--cooking. And in a lot of ways, this makes sense. A few months ago, I highlighted a home molecular gastronomy kit--effectively, a chemistry set that lets home cooks design basic recipes at a chemical level--and suggested at the time that giving home cooks these new tools will lead to gradual but dramatic shifts in the ways that we taste and experience food. Cornucopia, theoretically, would take this level of control and experimentation many steps further. Rather than worry about concepts in chemistry, home chefs can tweak layer after layer to try how different combinations taste.That said, avid home cooks are declining in numbers in part because advances in food science and declines in free time make the task of food preparation seem unnecessary and time consuming. This sort of device could give cooks an interesting new tool; but I think the bigger effect of 3-D food printing would be to enable a much larger number of people to automate their food choices for health and environmental purposes.