Food production machines have claimed, over the decades, to revolutionize life for the little lady in the frilly cocktail apron they’ve targeted. Now 3-D food printers are set to occupy that counter space. They’ll bring the expected new technology to be managed, and they’ll demand new skills of their users.
3-D Printed Frosting Photo Credit: CNN
Three-D food printers will turn out any item you fancy, if you can write the software that tells it how to execute your grand gourmet plan. Or you can simply buy or download the program.
Creating Culinary Genius at Home
The 3-D food printing process may lead you to rediscover the joy of cooking, or at least selecting, supervising and producing a culinary creation, and an instantly edible one at that. Your new genius may feature:
- Fail proof food production, every time
- Cooking for one lone diner or to share efficiently and effortlessly, without waste
- Customization of portion sizes, nutritional content, and dietary preferences
- Personalization of food with intricate designs on its inside layers, or with names or patterns on individual servings
- Heightened artistic capabilities in the ‘cook’
Simply select your food foundation, a paste that you load into your 3-D food printer, and then start your program and presto-you’re cooking!
The printer deposits material, first drawing the perimeter and then fills in your creation with layers, squiggles, decorations and varied densities.
You now have access, as an individual consumer to food that was once too complex to make due to lack of skill, time, appliances, or ingredients.
Your gastronomic delight’s material has a very specific name. Read more about it and what food can be simulated in the Cornell University abstract: Hydrocolloid Printing: A Novel Platform for Customized Food Production
For now, since it’s almost meal time again here, let me pick a few prose posies for our table from it:
- Fine dining chefs are more likely to pick up on 3-D printing as they are continually on the hunt for the new in technology, ingredients, including the non-traditional to create culinary magic.
- Solid Freeform Fabrication (SFF) offers huge diversity of design and menu assembly in the industrial kitchen.
- SFF will alter how chefs cook and the future of food. There may be hidden messages in your meat, designs in your dessert no human hand could have inserted and on demand food production.
- Imagine the mass-customization now possible. It can produce individual dishes at reasonable costs of time, skill and money that are not possible, especially in small quantities, by today’s mass production commercial cooking models.
- While culinary professionals are primed to adopt SFF, the technology benefits home cooks too. We will all likely be more productive and we’ll have a lot more knowledge. It may be, literally, at our fingertips on our keyboards or touch screens.
- Imagine a ‘set and forget’ level of ease with home cooking and at the level of famous chefs with a simple flick of the same 3-D fabrication file they use on their industrial kitchen computers.
We have yet to see if easy and economical use of processed organic paste will replace the joys of picking your own produce, meeting other folks at the market and engaging all the senses enjoying nature’s own delectable packaging. Food for thought, ah?
–Helena Kaufman
Helena Kaufman
Helena Kaufman is a writer and communications trainer.
In 1982, success at promoting, marketing and writing about 200 artisans launched Helena as an event publicist.
The designers who sold at the Annual Manitoba Christmas Craft Sale exhibited original functional and decorative pieces in fibre, pottery, metal, oil, paper, wood, distinctive wearable art and more.
Helena worked to raise their profile, bring media attention and increase their sales.
She now shares some of that savvy here at Lanterloon as one of our writers.
Helena’s writing and communications site can be found here.
About Helena Kaufman