Food Scraps Reuse is a kitchen appliance that is a household biogas energy generator. It takes in the family kitchen waste and converts it to electrical energy and a liquid fertilizer through the process of fermentation. While the electric energy can be used to power small kitchen appliances, the fertilizer can be used for houseplants. Superb!
– Yanko Design Timeless Designs – Explore wonderful concepts from around the world! Shop CKIE – We are more than just concepts. See what’s hot at the CKIE store by Yanko Design! (Reusing The Food Energy was originally posted on Yanko Design)
Amanda Chantal Bacon’s little juice bar on Rose Avenue in Venice, California has turned into a thriving mecca for raw food. This summer will see Moon Juice expanding, with an opening in Silver Lake, and Bacon…
Beth Galton, photographe spécialisé dans les clichés alimentaires, a réalisé avec l’aide du styliste culinaire Charlotte Omnes, cette série d’images appelée « Cut Food ». Pour composer ces clichés, Beth Galton a eu l’idée de remplacer les liquides par de la gélatine pour donner cette impression de découpe parfaite des objets.
In this article from Print Shift, our one-off magazine about additive manufacturing, Dezeen’s Ben Hobson asks how soon we could be tucking into 3D-printed steaks.
The concept of 3D-printed food is hard to swallow, but technology that could revolutionise the way we cook is hotting up.
In 2009, Philips Design presented a sci-fi vision of the future with a conceptual food printer that could produce a perfectly balanced meal at the touch of a few buttons. Part of a research project called Food Probe, which looked at how we might source and eat food in 15 to 20 years’ time, the imagined machine would allow our future selves to print out our ideal combinations of flavours and nutrients in an unlimited range of forms.
It sounded too Star Trek to be true (as Dezeen readers were quick to point out when we originally ran the story). But with 3D-printing technologies advancing as rapidly as they are, the idea may not be as far off as it once seemed.
Conceptual food printed by Philips Design
Philips itself is not developing a 3D food printer, but companies around the world are starting to take the concept seriously. Janne Kyttanen has been at the forefront of 3D-printing technology for many years and he believes food is next on the list to be revolutionised by 3D printing. “We have many different avenues in which 3D printing technology is moving. We’ve explored all different kinds of products and different materials,” he says. “Food is the next frontier.”
Kyttanen has already 3D-printed an experimental hamburger and a breakfast cereal in novelty shapes, including his own head, but these are merely conceptual models of plastic and plaster. “I wanted to pinch people a little bit. I printed burgers just to create an iconic image and make people realise that one day we will be able to 3D-print a hamburger.”
But while the 3D-printed burger of the future is some way off, the transition from printing with plastics to printing with food has already begun. In 2011 Luis Fraguada, research director at architecture studio Built By Associative Data, was using a desktop 3D printer to produce prototypes of customised crockery when he was approached by a young chef called Paco Morales, who asked him a question: if you can print out a plate, could you also print out a piece of food onto that plate?
Fraguada and Morales, together with architects Deniz Manisali, José Ramón Tramoyeres and Andrés Arias Madrid – who collectively make up the research group Robots In Gastronomy – have been working on a 3D food printer ever since.
Their machine uses an adapted version of the same fused deposition modelling technology that’s commonly used to print plastics: food is extruded through a nozzle and built up in layers to the specified design. “We started with a MakerBot,” Fraguada explains. “We put in our own print head to let us print out viscose food materials.”
The nature of the technology means the printer is limited to creating customised 3D shapes out of soft or puréed foodstuffs such as mascarpone, guacamole or chocolate spread; Fraguada soon discovered that “Nutella is the perfect material for printing”. But he believes the potential for the technology extends far beyond simple novelty value.
“For me, it’s interesting to think about the possibilities for somebody with specific dietary requirements – someone who needs to precisely measure out certain types of food, for example. Nutrition is the root of many of our medical problems, globally. My hope is that at some point we will have more control over the elements that we put into our bodies.”
It’s not just designers who are exploring the possibilities of 3D-printed food. Scientists at Cornell University’s Creative Machines Lab in Ithaca, New York, have developed an open-source desktop 3D printer called Fab@Home, which, using a similar extrusion-based technology, can print with plastic as well as cake mixture, icing and peanut butter.
They have also experimented with meat, but that proved to be much trickier. “We know from the flavouring industry that we can make anything taste like anything, and we know from the colouring industry that we can make anything look like anything,” Cornell scientist Jeffrey Lipton says. “But if food doesn’t have the right feel to it, if it feels too processed, people have a gut reaction against it.”
Nobody wants to eat a gloopy steak, basically. But Lipton has enjoyed some success with using meat as a print material. In 2010 he was able to print various types of puréed meat into shapes that were then deep-fried, including a scallop printed into the shape of a space shuttle, which was, Lipton assures, “absolutely delicious”. The key was to combine the puréed meat with an enzyme called transglutaminase, which helps the proteins reconnect and the meat to regain its texture. Lipton believes that with the necessary scientific research, we will one day be able to take the next step and print foodstuffs like meat “from the ground up”.
3D food printer by Philips Design
In fact, the research is already well underway. American company Modern Meadow was set up in 2012 with the specific goal to develop in vitro meat and leather products for which no animal has to die. The idea is to use the same bioprinting technology that is being developed in the medical industry to grow transplantable human tissue, but to produce meat for human consumption instead.
Modern Meadow is still a development-stage company, and it has put no time frame on when the meat it hopes to produce will be available to buy. But it has the money behind it to succeed; PayPal co-founder and billionaire Peter Thiel is an investor.
There are others willing to put money behind 3D-printed food. Kjeld van Bommel is a research scientist at Dutch contract research organisation TNO, which works with some of the world’s biggest food companies, and he says they are interested. “We’re actually doing projects with some international companies, big food companies, that see a future for 3D-printed food,” he says.
Unfortunately these projects are all top secret. But there is one project van Bommel is free to discuss. TNO is helping to develop a food printer as part of an EU-backed project aiming to improve the lives of people suffering from a condition called dysphagia, which causes chewing and swallowing problems. By removing the usual pleasures of eating, the condition often leads to malnutrition.
The machine TNO is developing will combine puréed foodstuffs with a special gelatine binding agent, and print them out in 3D shapes that are soft enough to be eaten. “We’re going to print a piece of chicken and we’re going to print a potato,” van Bommel explains. “People will get a plate of food in front of them that they can eat with a knife and fork, rather than having a milkshake three times a day. It’s already been shown that people eat better when they do that.”
The printer will work much like a 2D inkjet, printing out food in droplets and building up a 3D structure layer by layer. Crucially, just like the food printer conceived by Philips Design, its output will be completely customisable. “The food will be personalised,” van Bommel enthuses. “The number of calories will be personalised. Nutrients like calcium or omega-3 fatty acids will be personalised as well. Even the softness or hardness of the food will be tuned to the needs of the client. Everyone will get their own personalised plate of food in front of them.”
This printer is not a far-off fantasy. The project started in 2012, and if it stays on schedule, they’ll have a working prototype within three years. Van Bommel believes it will only take another couple of years after that before a commercial product is available.
Of course, while the softness of the food it will produce has obvious benefits for those suffering from swallowing disorders, most people would not want to eat it.
Nevertheless, as the technology continues to advance, and with companies with the necessary financial muscle starting to get behind 3D-printed food, a food printer of the kind Philips Design imagined seems a significant step closer to becoming reality.
1. Vitsoe Lucky Vitsoe Known for distributing the universal shelving system designed by legendary designer Dieter Rams, Vitsoe has recently been granted the exclusive worldwide license to Rams modular 620 Chair. To celebrate the ingenious design’s…
What the World Eat est une série photographique passionnante sur les habitudes de consommation dans le monde. L’artiste Peter Menzel visite différents pays pour photographier des familles ainsi que ce qu’elles consomment durant une semaine. Des clichés réunies dans le livre « Hungry Planet ».
Milan 2013: a coffee table topped with a giant hard-boiled sweet and a white chocolate chair are among items in a series of edible furniture by design studio Lanzavecchia + Wai (+ slideshow).
Designed in response to the current economic climate, the decorative or unnecessary elements of the furniture can be eaten until all that’s left is what’s needed for basic functionality. Lanzavecchia + Wai used a range of food types to build up each item around its pared-down black iron version.
The Hard Candy coffee table has a top made from a huge hard-boiled sweet that leaves one saucer at the end of each leg after it has been nibbled away.
Twenty-four kilograms of white chocolate was formed around a stool to create the Chocolate chair.
Rice bricks glued together with starch form a backrest for a bench, draped with a cotton quilt full of dried beans.
A table top baked into a cracker balances on stacked tins of corned beef, which can be removed as the table is munched to leave a simple tray.
The pieces were shown as part of a series of food-based projects at the Padiglione Italia‘s Foodmade exhibition, located in the Ventura Lambrate district of Milan.
The domestic landscape reflects our culture, our taste and our habits. The objects that populate it absorb the atmosphere that pervades the space through their physicality, functionality and identity.
Ostensibly living intact through good times and also adverse ones, the domestic objects become invisible to us over time with their familiarity.
How can furniture react to times of crisis? The decorational elements that were once appreciated, suddenly become superfluous and should evolve to reflect a new era of austerity; the objects become edible and offer themselves to be consumed when needed.
In four conceptual objects, Lanzavecchia + Wai repropose basic nutrients, carbohydrates, proteins, sugar and chocolate as food reserves which at the same time complement and finish the objects by covering elemental metal structures.
Piece by piece the object is eroded, exposing a soul, the core-function, which will remain over time. This will encourage us to re-think what basic necessities are: a true reflection on the essence of the things that will lead us into the future.
The Austerity collection consists of Hard Candy coffee table, Chocolate chair, Grains sofa and Hardtack table.
Using only cane sugar and natural flavoring derived from the real thing, Wondermade makes a superior small-batch mallow. Their little one-inch-squared marshmallows pack just enough flavor to bring a slight smile to your face, side stepping…
by Jason Kenny There’s a corner of Berlin where three canals meet, separating the über desirable Kreuzberg, the increasingly trendy Neukölln and the largely ignored Treptow. While one of the canals between Kreuzberg and Treptow once served as a part of…
Stockholm design studio PJADAD used tiny cubes and chunks of food to create this miniature landscape as a visual identity for the Swedish Atelier Food project and restaurant.
Towers of cheese, squares of beetroot, florets of broccoli and other edible items are laid out in a precise grid to create Still Life, which was designed by PJADAD as branding for Atelier Food, a Stockholm-based restaurant that runs workshops involving chefs, artists, designers, scientists and business developers.
PJADAD, which stands for Petter Johansson Art Direction and Design, comprises art director Johansson, graphic designer Oskar Svensson and copywriter Anton Wigbrand.
Here’s some more information from Petter Johansson:
Innovation through food
Atelier Food is a project that seeks new solutions and innovation through food. The project is initiated by international top chefs such as Stefan Eriksson and leading people from branches such as communication, science, culture and business.
Food is an important part of many future challenges. Atelier Food links food with sustainability, energy, culture, urban development and transportation. The project also link chefs with artists, designers, scientists and business developers. Together they seek global solutions and innovation through cooking, food labs and discussions. Atelier Food is represented by its on-going workshops and as a restaurant based in the heart of Stockholm, Sweden.
Creativity through food
The Atelier Food still life is built on a grid. The still life represents the work of Atelier Food and the connection between food and society. It links the playfulness and creativity within the project with the ambitious goals and long-term challenges. In the spirit of the whole Atelier Food project it is also a creative co-operation between a chef, one art director and one photographer. Petter Johansson Art Direction And Design (PJADAD) is a small experimental studio working in the fields of communication, strategy and design. The studio employs one art director, one copywriter and one graphic designer. We like to see our customers as partners and strive to build, develop or maintain their brands.
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