SXSWorld
Issue link: https://sxsw.uberflip.com/i/211359
Will the Kitchens of the Future Feature 3D Printers? by Susan Elizabeth Shepard rom Willy Wonka's "3 Course Dinner Chewing Gum" to the Jetsons' food pills, the food of the future often has been portrayed as processed objects of wonder. Now that the future is here, the most-discussed technology used to change food from raw materials into a finished product gets compared to the actual science fiction of Star Trek's replicator: 3D printing. 3D food printing lets users input recipes that will not only tell a printer how to create cookies in shapes that could never be made by hand, but also customize the nutrient content of food. It has the attention of The New York Times, where A.J. Jacobs recently published a feature about how he 3D printed an entire dinner, and NASA, which awarded a grant to Austin-based Systems & Materials Research Corporation to work on a food synthesizer prototype. SMRC's proposal to NASA, for whom they are making a pizza printer, contained, in part, the following: "By exploring and implementing technologies such as 3D printing, this may avoid food shortage, inflation, starvation, famine and even food wars." And that isn't science fiction. This potential practical application to food scarcity made it a natural point of interest for sustainability consultant Michelle Erickson, who recently moderated SXSWEco's "3D Printing: The Answer to Global Food Scarcity?" panel. "There's gonna be a lot of mouths to feed, limited resources, our climate systems are completely changing. So now is the time to have the discussion. What are the possibilities? What does it look like? What can we do now that will help us to have an end result that we feel good about? That the majority of the population will feel good about?" says Erickson. That majority, an ever-increasing number, is on the mind of Jed Davis, who became the Cabot Creamery Cooperative's first Director of Sustainability in 2008. While Davis works within a very traditional section of the food industry—aged cheddar cheese is the opposite of instantaneous—he sees the use of emerging technologies as a vital part of the future of food security: "I'm really thankful that there's a growing forum on food, because my crystal ball says that's going to be a really big challenge over the rest of our lives and the lives of our children. We haven't fully explored where technology can come to bear here." Early applications of 3D food printing experimented primarily with the structure of food and quickly produced a corn chip that looked like a flower, a cake with words inside, and broccoli shaped like an airplane. The content of the food wasn't changed so much as its presentation. But engineering professor Hod Lipson, the robotics and 3D printing expert who directs the Creative Machines Lab at Cornell University, said he realized early on that food printing might have important unanticipated applications. "We started with food printing around 2006, and initially it was more of a novelty thing, an interesting new way to connect food and cooking and information technology, and do interesting things; create these shaped pastries and so forth," says Lipson. "But as time moved on, people started asking, 'Is there a way to harness this technology to address food, nutrition and food issues globally?' " There are two main potential applications of using food printing as a tool to combat food scarcity, stemming from its ability to transform the basic inputs into consumable form. The first is that a monotonous supply can be made more appetizing. It could be difficult to trans20 SXSWORLD / NOVEMBER 2013 JULIE COUCHMAN F SMRC's 3D printed pizza at SXSW ECO 2013 "In emergency situations, it is more effective to ship a very compact raw material that has high nutritional value, but it's not necessarily something that everybody wants to eat or is appealing or offers variety ..." port a variety of foods from their point of origin to where they are needed, but you can take the more easily transportable and make it more palatable. "In emergency situations, it is more effective to ship a very compact raw material that has high nutritional value, but it's not necessarily something that everybody wants to eat or is appealing or offers variety," reasons Lipson. The other notion is that nutrients can be added to a food supply that lacks them. "Another thing that I think is interesting is the ability to embed nutrients into food on personal levels—nutrients, medicine, address different shortcomings of food all during the printing in a more systematic and controlled way," Lipson explains. "That doesn't solve hunger issues, but it can solve nutritional balance and it offers new tools to address these issues." The potential emergency applications of food printing also intrigued Davis. "The opportunity to compress that time in a way that more specifically addresses nutrient needs. I'm thinking especially in emergency situations where for whatever reason food supplies have been decimated and there's just an absolutely urgent need for food," he says. Lipson is careful to emphasize that the technology depends on inputs, which ultimately have to come from somewhere: "To be clear, 3D printing does not create food. It reshapes food. There's no way out of that. You can't make food out of nothing. It's a matter of doing more with the quantity you have." It just happens that "doing more" resembles a pizza more than a pill. n