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PhysOrg runs a story on the implications of 3D printers for the food industry.
The use of 3D printers has the potential to revolutionize the way food is manufactured within the next 10 to 20 years, impacting everything from how military personnel get food on the battlefield to how long it takes to get a meal from the computer to your table..
The article attributes the following to "Hod Lipson, Ph.D., a professor of engineering at Columbia University and a co-author of the book Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing"
3D printing is a good fit for the food industry because it allows manufacturers to bring complexity and variety to consumers at a low cost. Traditional manufacturing is built on mass production of the same item, but with a 3D printer, it takes as much time and money to produce a complex, customized product that appeals to one person as it does to make a simple, routine product that would be appealing to a large group. ... Users could choose from a large online database of recipes, put a cartridge with the ingredients into their 3D printer at home, and it would create the dish just for that person. The user could customize it to include extra nutrients or replace one ingredient with another.
Original Submission
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @07:27PM
Finally, we can spec out a great recipe and have it replicated by a machine over and over with machine efficiency and consistency.
RIP, shitty chefs.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday July 14 2015, @07:45PM
I saw the first line and swore you were going to enter McDonalds territory there, or gross TV dinner territory.
Short of food safety violations or being totally stoned/drunk out of their minds, I don't think its possible for a sober and semi-conscious home cook to create something as foul as a Mcdonalds burger. That stuff isn't even meat! The bun isn't even bread! The condiments are basically boiled down kool aid made with corn syrup! I've done a lot of cooking. Being honest, and not really giving a F what people think of my cooking, I can publicly admit the only way to make good food is to make a lot of crap food, and I've made a lot of crap food, a lot of crap burgers. None as bad as McDonalds burgers. Ever. Even at my worst.
Cooking is a lot like coding or carpentry in that no one like to admit in public but the only way you make good stuff is shoveling out a lot of awful stuff first. Yet, in carpentry I've never made anything quite as useless as walmart particle board furniture. I've made what boils down to firewood, but at least it burns non-toxic. Lets not get started on 1997 era perl CGI scripts, hey, it freakin worked, OK? and I haven't written stuff that bad since '97, too.
I'm just saying, given past experience with machine-like precision, anything, for consumers, you'd like to think you'll get something exotic, but market pressure or economic pressure or WTF pressure means you'll mostly get vomit in a bag and be told by tv that you like it that way.
Its kind of like some pie in the sky stuff about TV, imagine how it could uplift our culture and educational system, but 99% of what we ended up with was hillbilly hand fishin and beavis n butthead and ouch thats my balls.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @08:08PM
Yeah I wouldn't call the ex-cons who reheat pre-cooked food at Applebee's chefs. I only assume they are ex-cons because the amount of over-spicing they do leads me to believe they learned to cook in prison and the fact the only spices they know are salt and pepper.