Food is one of the fundamental ingredients of life. We cannot go a day without it before experiencing discomfort and the kinds of food we eat and how we eat them are closely intertwined with our cultural practices, physical environments, and personal health. So when we at SiliconAngle heard about 3D printable food, we had to check it out.

So, when was the last time you had to prepare a dish you made before, without a precise recipe you perhaps produced something that didn’t taste exactly like you expected? Scolars of innovation labs at MIT have developed a new three dimensional printer that will allow you to “print” the food, set the quantity to the smallest parameters and then duplicate them easily.

While it could be argued that part of the joy of cooking is all about the hand-made quality and the fact that it produces different results each time; perhaps there’s also an argument for experimenting with ideas that will generally produce the same results.

At a time when the work takes almost all day and the cook has neither the time nor the energy, a balanced diet is something completely unattainable. Trying to find a way out of this situation, two graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Marcelo Coelho and Amit Zoran, came to a very ingenious solution: a 3D-printer that can literally type food.

More specifically, the new device called the Cornucopia that store, mix food material in precise and does it in an unusual way–printing layers of different combinations of products.

How It Works?

The food printer is at the concept design stage, and would work by storing and refrigerating ingredients and then mixing them, cooking layers of the mixture and printing them onto a serving tray.

Production process (or print) begins with a collection of containers filled with various materials required for selected food. Once you have the ingredients and you connected to all tanks to the appropriate place, you can use the built-in multi-touch screen to define the use of any ingredients by providing calories, fat and various vitamins information.

Special dispenser delivers the ingredients in the required amount in the mixer. The resulting mixture enters the extruder which generates from it a small sheet. Furthermore, in this step the food is heated or cooled. This process of cooking allows you to create dishes, taste, smell, and texture which will be quite unique. Besides the opportunity to experiment with taste, the owner of Cornucopia will be able to fine-tune the quality and nutritional value of the food they cooked.

“Computer-controlled machines have started a new revolution in design, allowing designers to manipulate forms and materials with increased and previously unimaginable capability and efficiency. This versatility, applied to cooking, can enable users to develop new flavors, textures, scents and shapes to create entirely new eating experiences that could be difficult to achieve through traditional cooking methods,” the authors said in the paper.

Futuristic Design Space

As described in the site, the authors have conceptualized three prototypes: the Virtuoso Mixer, the Digital Fabricator, and the Robotic Chef.

The Robotic Chef is a mechanical arm that can physically and chemically transform a single solid food object, such as a piece of fish or a fruit. The equipment is a marriage of a food processor and spice rack. The Virtuoso Mixer allows a chef to quickly design, produce and evaluate (by tasting) several ingredient combinations. Finally, the Digital Fabricator is a personal, three-dimensional printer for food, akin to a combination refrigerator/stove.

“It’s cooking process starts with an array of food canisters, which refrigerate and store a user’s favorite ingredients. These are piped into a mixer and extruder head that can accurately deposit elaborate food combinations with sub-millimeter precision,” the authors wrote in their paper. “The food is heated or cooled by the Digital Fabricator while deposition takes place, and this process not only allows for the creation of flavors and textures that would be completely unimaginable through other cooking techniques, but, through a touch-screen interface and web connectivity, also allows users to have ultimate control over the origin, quality, nutritional value and taste of every meal.”

It is still not known as to when the device will be ready for market. Currently, scientists are still working on the interface, and the controls of the prototype.

How 3D Printing May Shape the Future of Food

One of the major advantages of a 3D printer is that it provides personalized nutrition. If you’re male, female, someone is sick—they all have different dietary needs. If you can program your needs into a 3D printer, it can print exactly the nutrients that person requires.

Anjan Contractor’s company,  Systems & Materials Research Corporation, is experimenting with a food printer, a powder that contains our daily needs such as protein, fats, carbohydrates, Omega 3 and vitamins and minerals will be used to create what you might call food pellets. NASA recently awarded a $125,000 grant to Contractor to create a prototype of his universal food synthesizer or a 3D food printer.

Chef David Arnold of The French Culinary Institute, Lipton and his colleagues at Cornell have experimented with printing food called Fab@Home project, which include a cookie with the Cornell‘C’ embedded within it and sea scallops shaped like the space shuttle. Lipton used the technology to create one cookie that accounted for 10 percent of his caloric deficit for one day.

Students working with the Cornell Creative Machines Lab (CCML) at Cornell University have developed a 3D food printer capable of printing a space shuttle-shaped scallop along with cakes that display dates, initials and corporate logos when sliced.

With all these developments, it is quite possible for 3D food printers to create foods in geometric patterns and shapes that are impossible to produce by hand in the future. People like to play with food. They like to express themselves in food. This allows them to express themselves in not just what the food is made of, but what it’s shaped like.