Here’s an interesting thought: What if eating greener and more sustainably meant printing your meals? Marcelo Coelho and Amit Zoran, a couple ingenious minds at MIT, have come up with a way to do just that. Hailed as ‘The Cornucopia’, this 3-D printer concept is a personal food factory that fuses the digital world with the realm of cooking by storing, precisely mixing, depositing, and cooking layers of ingredients with no waste.
Cornucopias’ printing process begins with an array of food canisters filled with the “cook’s” foods of choice. After a meal selection has been made using the device’s multi-touch translucent screen, users are able to see their meal being assembled while simultaneously manipulating real-time parameters, such as calories or carbohydrate content. Each ingredient is then piped into a mixer and then very precisely extruded, allowing for very exact and elaborate combinations of food.
Once each ingredient has been dropped, the food is then heated or cooled by Cornucopia’s chamber or via the heating and cooling tubes located on the printing head. In fact, the ability to hyper-localize heating and create rapid temperature changes also allows for the creation of meals with flavors and textures that would be impossible to replicate with present-day cooking methods.
If the refills are priced the same way as inkjet refills, no one will be able to afford to eat.
Will they make you buy the entire cartridge when you run out of ketchup?
How is this useful? Exact control of ingredients and nutrition? Why?
Oh mi god! it’s a replicator just from Star Trek!
Nothin’ says Lovin’ like somethin’ from the 3-dimensional nutritional printing device.
Soylent green! It’s made of a selection of carefully tuned nutritional nozzles!
It\’s a Food-a-rack-a-cycle! Now we just need Rosie the robot to run it…