We certainly won’t say, we didn’t see this coming but yes, the unbelievable deed is finally taking place. Hod Lipson and his team at Columbia University (CU) have been developing a prototype 3D printer designed to print edible creations using a variety of pastes, gels, powders and liquid ingredients. It clearly is meticulously crafted computer software with the purpose to cook within the printer itself.
‘We've been cooking forever,’ says Lipson, a Mechanical Engineering professor at Columbia University (CU), wants to help reinvigorate the area,. ‘But if you think about it, while technology and software have wormed their way into almost every aspect of our lives, cooking is still very, very primitive – we still cook over an open flame, like our ancestors millennia ago. So this is one area where software has not yet permeated. And when software touches something, it takes off.’
The CU team’s device is designed to open up possibilities of all kinds of food we eat. It will obviously make preparing meals easy and even help people manage dietary requirements.
‘Food printers are not meant to replace conventional cooking – they won't solve all of our nutritional needs, nor cook everything we should eat,’ says Lipson. ‘But they will produce an infinite variety of customized fresh, nutritional foods on demand, transforming digital recipes and basic ingredients supplied in frozen cartridges into healthy dishes that can supplement our daily intake.’
While, there are mixed inputs from relevant industry experts to this innovation; we can only wait and find where exactly they can go with these machines.
