The audacious plan to end hunger with 3-D printed food.

Why bake when you can extrude? (TNO Research)

Anjan Contractor’s 3D food printer might evoke visions of the
“replicator” popularized in Star Trek, from which Captain Picard was
constantly interrupting himself to order tea. And indeed Contractor’s
company, Systems & Materials Research Corporation, just got a six month,
$125,000 grant from NASA to create a prototype of his universal food
synthesizer.

But Contractor, a mechanical engineer with a background in 3D printing,
envisions a much more mundane—and ultimately more important—use for the
technology. He sees a day when every kitchen has a 3D printer, and the
earth’s 12 billion people feed themselves customized,
nutritionally-appropriate meals synthesized one layer at a time, from
cartridges of powder and oils they buy at the corner grocery store.
Contractor’s vision would mean the end of food waste, because the powder
his system will use is shelf-stable for up to 30 years, so that each
cartridge, whether it contains sugars, complex carbohydrates, protein or
some other basic building block, would be fully exhausted before being
returned to the store.

Ubiquitous food synthesizers would also create new ways of producing the
basic calories on which we all rely. Since a powder is a powder, the
inputs could be anything that contain the right organic molecules. We
already know that eating meat is environmentally unsustainable, so why
not get all our protein from insects?

If eating something spat out by the same kind of 3D printers that are
currently being used to make everything from jet engine parts to fine
art doesn’t sound too appetizing, that’s only because you can currently
afford the good stuff, says Contractor. That might not be the case once
the world’s population reaches its peak size, probably sometime near the
end of this century.

“I think, and many economists think, that current food systems can’t
supply 12 billion people sufficiently,” says Contractor. “So we
eventually have to change our perception of what we see as food.”
There will be pizza on Mars
The ultimate in molecular gastronomy. (Schematic of SMRC’s 3D printer
for food.)(SMRC)

If Contractor’s utopian-dystopian vision of the future of food ever
comes to pass, it will be an argument for why space research isn’t a
complete waste of money. His initial grant from NASA, under its Small
Business Innovation Research program, is for a system that can print
food for astronauts on very long space missions. For example, all the
way to Mars.

“Long distance space travel requires 15-plus years of shelf life,” says
Contractor. “The way we are working on it is, all the carbs, proteins
and macro and micro nutrients are in powder form. We take moisture out,
and in that form it will last maybe 30 years.”

Pizza is an obvious candidate for 3D printing because it can be printed
in distinct layers, so it only requires the print head to extrude one
substance at a time. Contractor’s “pizza printer” is still at the
conceptual stage, and he will begin building it within two weeks. It
works by first “printing” a layer of dough, which is baked at the same
time it’s printed, by a heated plate at the bottom of the printer. Then
it lays down a tomato base, “which is also stored in a powdered form,
and then mixed with water and oil,” says Contractor.

Finally, the pizza is topped with the delicious-sounding “protein
layer,” which could come from any source, including animals, milk or
plants.

The prototype for Contractor’s pizza printer (captured in a video,
above) which helped him earn a grant from NASA, was a simple chocolate
printer. It’s not much to look at, nor is it the first of its kind, but
at least it’s a proof of concept.
Replacing cookbooks with open-source recipes
SMRC’s prototype 3D food printer will be based on open-source hardware
from the RepRap project.(RepRap)

Remember grandma’s treasure box of recipes written in pencil on
yellowing note cards? In the future, we’ll all be able to trade recipes
directly, as software. Each recipe will be a set of instructions that
tells the printer which cartridge of powder to mix with which liquids,
and at what rate and how it should be sprayed, one layer at time.

This will be possible because Contractor plans to keep the software
portion of his 3D printer entirely open-source, so that anyone can look
at its code, take it apart, understand it, and tweak recipes to fit. It
would of course be possible for people to trade recipes even if this
printer were proprietary—imagine something like an app store, but for
recipes—but Contractor believes that by keeping his software open
source, it will be even more likely that people will find creative uses
for his hardware. His prototype 3D food printer also happens to be based
on a piece of open-source hardware, the second-generation RepRap 3D
printer.

“One of the major advantage of a 3D printer is that it provides
personalized nutrition,” says Contractor. “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.”
Replacing farms with sources of environmentally-appropriate calories
2032: Delicious Uncle Sam’s Meal Cubes are laser-sintered from
granulated mealworms; part of this healthy breakfast.(TNO Research)

Contractor is agnostic about the source of the food-based powders his
system uses. One vision of how 3D printing could make it possible to
turn just about any food-like starting material into an edible meal was
outlined by TNO Research, the think tank of TNO, a Dutch holding company
that owns a number of technology firms.

In TNO’s vision of a future of 3D printed meals, “alternative
ingredients” for food include:

* algae

* duckweed

* grass

* lupine seeds

* beet leafs

* insects

From astronauts to emerging markets

While Contractor and his team are initially focusing on applications for
long-distance space travel, his eventual goal is to turn his system for
3D printing food into a design that can be licensed to someone who wants
to turn it into a business. His company has been “quite successful in
doing that in the past,” and has created both a gadget that uses
microwaves to evaluate the structural integrity of aircraft panels and a
kind of metal screw that coats itself with protective sealant once it’s
drilled into a sheet of metal.

Since Contractor’s 3D food printer doesn’t even exist in prototype form,
it’s too early to address questions of cost or the healthiness (or not)
of the food it produces. But let’s hope the algae and cricket pizza
turns out to be tastier than it sounds.


From:
http://qz.com/86685/the-audacious-pl...d-printed-food

Sqwertz wrote:
> we still have world hunger.


You still stalk women here.