Cornell Lab Prints Food

[ksmith]

There are printers that can spit out 3-D model cars and others that can make paper solar panels. Next up: technology that can print food for restaurants and homes.

Engineers envision printed breakfasts synced with alarm clocks and gourmet spreads downloaded from high-end restaurants but served at the dinner table. Printers could to linked to digital food logs and programmed to churn out meals that fill in the day’s nutritional blanks.

So instead of not being able to get a table at an exclusive restaurants, will there be a waiting list for licenses for a particular dish?

It occurs to me how this could revolutionize food manufacturing–anything you eat could be plumped full of nutrients/fat-free/tuned to your individual metabolism. Could kick world hunger in the slats as well, depending on the price of the starting materials.

UPDATE: added link to the Cornell website, which I forgot to do before.

Link to the Cornell website here.

Mirrored from Kristine Smith.

Comments

[e-moon60.livejournal.com]

I can't imagine a duller eating experience than "manufactured foods" cooked by someone else and delivered via my printer. Like "gourmet" and "nutritionally balanced" frozen meals. I want my eggs from a chicken, my milk and butter and cheese from something with four legs and hair, and my vegetables from a garden, preferably mine. I want my kitchen to smell like I've got something good on the stove or in the oven.

Says the cranky old lady rejoicing in her All-Clad, Le Creuset, and plain old-fashioned cast iron.

Speaking of cooking, though, at the funeral I attended today, in a pre-Civil War house in Salado, TX, by going through the door marked please don't go here (or something like that--but was led by family member) I saw a wonderful old wood cookstove. Lots of bells & whistles (for a wood stove) with all the lids you lift off (but didn't see the tool for doing so), the warming shelf above, the little side thingie (don't know the name of it.) I saw my mother cook on a wood stove in Colorado, but it was gone before I was old enough to be allowed within feet of it (one summer, this was.)

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

You have the luxury of being able to access a variety of fresh foods, though. I can see a significant percentage of people being quite content, if not eager, to eat printed foods. If it allows them types of meals that they would not otherwise get, or lets them eat foods they otherwise couldn't eat?

And I hate to say it, but depending on how well the food chemistry works out, I can see some manufactured foods tasting better than natural. I've been routinely disappointed with the flavor of my garden tomatoes. And hot dogs don't taste the way they did when I was a kid because, I assume, the beef is so different. If they can get those flavors back...?

[puddleshark.livejournal.com]

Horrified, is my immediate reaction... I think we need more, not less, connection with our local food sources. Filling people full of nice cheap imported processed soya and palm oil will do nothing to help protect biodiversity.

[e-moon60.livejournal.com]

Yup. Also it removes--as fast food does, in a way--the connection between people that comes with cooking and eating in company. (Though admittedly, in the two places where I sometimes eat fast food, I sorta recognize some of the people who work there, and they sorta recognize me. And there's a human face involved in the transaction.) When food is just a commodity, and the people who buy it are just consumers, we lose a whole range of human interactions.

People are "quite content, if not eager" to eat cheap manufactured food now--that's how come the fast food industry prospers. But we already know the outcome of that in both ecological and personal terms. It's not good. It turns humans into stockyard cattle, fattened up for profit. The prepared-foods industry (including the frozen meals) allows people to retain the semblance of cooking and eating with a family or friend-group, but again provides a more manufactured-food experience, and is supported by large-scale agribusiness which is death on biodiversity and used way too many pesticides in the course of producing the food. Only those with money have the luxury of human-cooked foods prepared outside the home.

The artificial flavors can make soya and corn oil taste like something else; they already do. But the flavors are limited--they don't provide all the nuances because that would be more costly for the manufacturer (and more costly for the consumer if they did it with the same profit margin.)

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Maybe I'm just feeling argumentative this morning, but I am not altogether convinced that printed foods will lead to less variety in diet, or greater agribusiness control over same. I'm thinking of the growing market in e-books as comparison. The numbers of readers is limited, but the amount of content is exploding, and the dynamic seems to change once you 1) bring down the cost of the delivery device, 2) have folks being able to make choices in the privacy of their homes and, 3) have smaller producers being able to get their product out there readily. Will it depend on who controls the patents for this type of food development? Maybe. It becomes a programmed process, and once you have a programmed process, you introduce the opportunities for hacks and work-arounds. Pirated foods. Boutique "publishers." Will there always be a Big Six? Maybe. But will they remain the sole providers of content? Looks doubtful, at least at the moment, judging from what is currently happening with the consumable that is story.

As for biodiversity, I recall reading a few months ago about the reemergence of old, forgotten varieties of apples. It's part of the locavore movement--growers are reviving varieties that vanished or fell out of favor as the move toward more uniform, supermarket-stable, monovarietal (I think I just made up a word) orchards grew. These new varieties sound wonderful, but as someone who lives half a country away, I may never get to try them because I don't live in the area and the newly-redeveloped apples 1) don't ship well, and/or 2) are grown in such small quantities that export from the locale in which they're grown isn't possible. But with a printer and sufficiently advanced--yes, I know that's one hell of a conditional--flavor tech, I could print a pie containing one variety of such apples, or a blend, because I don't have to live in the area in order to obtain the real thing. So I've improved the diversity of my diet without leaving my locale.

And, she said, pondering over her coffee, if one disconnects the need for monovarietal beef/apples/oranges/etc from the land, or eliminates the need for them in whole or in part because people can get more variety without turning over vast acreage to the production of those foodstuffs, don't you open the door to more biodiversity simply because you don't need to use land anymore to produce food and may be able to leave it go fallow? Will there always be those who prefer dirt-grown/land-raised? Maybe. But it's a labor-intensive process that is weather-dependent, and it's possible that we may reach a point where it's no longer a viable option for large or even smaller-scale food production.

[e-moon60.livejournal.com]

I will try not to feel too argumentative in return--it's your space, and you've a right to your opinion. However (backing away from sweet reason once again) I'm going to argue on the basis of land use and biodiversity that I think you're missing something.

"don't you open the door to more biodiversity simply because you don't need to use land anymore to produce food and may be able to leave it go fallow?"

Here's why I think a) it wouldn't be let go fallow and b) just letting former ag land go fallow does not ensure biodiversity, or the biodiversity that would be healthy.

If you don't need to use land to produce food, that land is likely to be chosen for development rather than left fallow. In many place, the only value open land is seen to have is for agriculture, and governments are generally interested in land use that produces tax income or employment (thus leading indirectly to tax income.) Nonagricultural open land, because it does not produce an income, is usually taxed on its development potential and this creates a strong incentive for those holding it to "do something with it"--either sell to developers or develop it themselves. A growing population demands more housing, more roads, more services. A large acreage near Austin has been converted entirely to pavement and "landscaping" as a racetrack for high speed cars...land that was native grass pastures with probably as many species on it as ours, with an annual positive O2/CO2 balance...is now a human-petrochemical monoculture that will produce noise, air pollution, traffic congestion nearby, and consume fuel. Its O2/CO@ balance is now, and will be, strongly negative: it and its patrons will put out CO2 exclusively. But: temporarily at least, it will "provide jobs" during its construction and no doubt a few jobs once it's up and running.

It is true that agribusiness has encouraged the exploitation of previously un-farmed land to produce exportable agriculture (having already bought up land from small-farmers who were producing local supplies of food.) This obviously damages the planetary ecosystem in multiple ways--loss of biodiversity, loss of carbon sequestration capacity. It is possible (not certain but possible) that if all-artificial food were as profitable to those companies as growing soybeans in the former Amazonian jungle (for instance), they would quit cutting down trees and start building plants to supply the components for manufactured food. If the foods were as readily available to the poor in some regions as the foods they now grow, perhaps they would not (but only perhaps)

But agribusiness is not the only source of the destruction of open land. Mining is another big one: the world hunger for certain raw materials has destroyed plenty of forest and other open land, with every bit as destructive an effect on water quality, biodiversity, and human health. "Mountain-topping" in the Appalachians for coal...strip mining generally around the world, whether for fuel or other valued substances, destroys biosystems and poisons water.

Moreover, "fallow" land, taken out of agricultural production, does not soon (in some cases ever) support significant biodiversity. Depending on the kind of agriculture practiced, and the management later given the fallow land, it can take a short, or a very very long time, to reap ecological benefits. That's worth a second post in itself.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I completely agree that not using land for farming leaves it open to other uses that may in the long run prove less than ideal. I'm not convinced that a move away from widespread fertilizer/pesticide/othercide use isn't also a good thing, though. And not all farmland is suitable for further habitable development, business development, or other uses such as mining.

I also agree that land management will likely be necessary to develop and maintain biodiversity. But I believe that as mass transportation or cleaner forms of personal conveyance develop, and as green energy sources such as solar take hold, that the possibility of ecologically sound and sustainable human settlement increases. I don't believe it all needs to be high-rises, pavement, and asphalt. Yes, I'm a dreamer. Maybe. But some sources I've read indicate that population growth, at least here in the US and in other First World countries, is slowing more than expected. Even the influx of immigrants isn't boosting numbers as much as was once thought it would because as people become more educated and economic well-being improves, birth rates go down. We may not need as much food/land/roads/development in 50 or 60 years as we once thought.

I don't know how accurate the numbers are, but according to a couple of sites, about 41% of the US is classified as farmland, and about half of that is considered cropland. Of that cropland, I don't know how much is classic small family farm, and how much is factory farming/agribusiness.

I am not 100% convinced, iow, that loss of land as cropland will lead to it being misused in other ways. Economic impact is a consideration, but how much future economic development will depend on land use? Can we answer that question?

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. It's the Star Trek food replicators!

Presumably the material that would be used for this would be lab-grown cloned vegetable and protein product, and thus the above concerns regarding biodiversity, etc. don't apply.

From a gut-reaction perspective, I don't want varieties to go extinct except in labs the same way I don't want the last living polar bears to be those in zoos. But this is an emotional reaction. Those polar bears in zoos are a lot better off than the wild ones, in the same way that a housecat has a life expectancy five times as long as as street kitty. (Yet I still want wild polar bears!)

But from the perspective of being able to feed starving people (or the first-world issue of being able to have a good meal on the nights I come home tired and don't feel like cooking), this has potential.

For space travel, or a moon base, this would be absolutely necessary. It will be cheaper and easier to clone and grow food as needed than to set up cattle farms on the moon, or to ship sides of beef as cargo.

And frankly, if it means that we can have chocolate that doesn't taste like a ball of wax and sugar or cost $50/lb, I'm in favor of it.

I don't think there's much worry that people will stop growing real food. We don't need houseplants, either, but people have those. Home gardens generally cost more than just going to the store, and while flavor is a strong motivator for many home gardeners, I suspect that most of them just like doing it.

The ready availability of lab-grown gemstones hasn't killed the market for those dug out of the ground.