Saw a news story about 3-D printing food and wasn’t sure what in the heck it was. They talked about making customized MRE’s for each soldier. The soldier has something built into his armor, which monitors his body to see what he is missing in his daily diet. It then sends a message to the field replicator, where an MRE can be 3-D printed for that specific soldier.
Wondered what in the hell are they talking about? How can you 3-D print food?
Edible 3D printing emerged several years ago with Cornell's Fab@Home printer, which won a 2007 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award. The syringe-based machine works like an inkjet printer, depositing layers of viscous liquids to build up an object according to a user's uploaded design
I can see that it would involve liquids, which would be built up in layers, much like an inkjet printer. Had seen how you can 3-d print a gun and it is actually usable, so wondered about 3-d printed food.
"People started experimenting, putting in different things like epoxies and silicones," Lipton says. "Then we started seeing what other people did when they went into their kitchens, things like Cheese Whiz, Nutella and frosting . . . You can extrude anything through it."
In fact, foods created by printers have already hit shelves."A lot of people don't know this, but all the microwave pancakes available in supermarkets in the Netherlands are printed,"
Wow! 3-d pancakes, you can nuke?
Van Bommel calls the pancakes "two-and-a-half-D-printing," because they are formed through a single deposition of batter. Other products out there meet the definition of 3D printing, or additive manufacturing. The U.K.'s Choc Edge, for example, sells printers that melt chocolate and pile it up in layers to create custom shapes. This past Valentine's Day, FabCafe in Japan crafted 3D-printed chocolate faces of customers' significant others. Last summer, Google introduced 3D-printed pasta in its employee cafeteria.
Wouldn’t this be a great side business, especially for Valentine’s Day. That sounds fantastic!
These early examples have all used simple, processed, single-ingredient pastes, powders or purees. No one is yet able to manufacture anything as diverse as, say, a burger with all the fixings. Cobbling together all the different ingredients and structures, given varying temperature requirements and sterility needs, is truly daunting.
So rather than reinventing an organic object, van Bommel says one of the promises of 3D food printing is to create novel consumables with personalized nutritional content. "You can add extra calcium or omega-3 fatty acids, and all done in a patient-specific way,"he says. To this end, his group is researching 3D food printing to help nursing home residents who suffer from dysphagia and have trouble chewing and swallowing food. These elderly people typically get their meals in the form of an unappealing milkshake of pureed chicken and broccoli, for example, leading to loss of appetite and malnourishment. Van Bommel has a grant from the European Union to develop 3D-printable soft replacement foods loaded with nutrients
Had a friend, whom I visited in the nursing home and saw some of these elderly people with these milkshakes. They looked disgusting, no wonder people lost their appetite and were malnourished!
Printed foods could also use smarter, more sustainable caloric sources, such as algae protein in place of resource-intensive animal meat."I'd rather that instead of printing a steak from cow protein, you could make it from algae or insects," van Bommel says. In one example, his group added milled mealworm to a shortbread 3D cookie recipe. "The look [of the worms] put me off, but in the shape of a cookie I'll eat it," van Bommel says. "You eat with your eyes."
Hmmm! Recollect that movie in the ‘70's, I think, where they helped you die, if you wanted to, then anyone who diedy, instead of burying you they processed you into wafers or something, which was fed to the people still living. They tried to tell people it was algae from the sea processed into something edible, called Soylent Green. That movie totally grossed me out.
But what about the dream of a universal 3D food printer—something like a Star Trek replicator that could fabricate whatever you request? This prospect, while theoretically possible, poses immense challenges, van Bommel notes. "Obviously if you're going for universal 3D food printer, you can't have 50 million cartridges lying around for the moment you want to print a tomato," he says. "It sounds simple to say 'we'll have a fat cartridge,' but there are hundreds of kinds of fats." Instead, he envisions a machine with a limited range of inputs. "Maybe three types of proteins, three types of carbs . . . It could happen, but we would need to know a lot about how to make different types of foods from those building blocks."
Had always wondered about the Star Trek food replicator, so now you are seeing it may be entirely possible in the distant future.
A major obstacle for all 3D printing, and especially for that of food, is that the printing process is slow, requiring cooling or curing periods, for example, before more material is deposited.
Some researchers are trying to speed up the process to make 3D-printed food more realistic. Van Bommel's TNO has a process that uses a laser-based technique to locally cook the food (the company used it to cook an egg white into the world's smallest fried egg, less than an inch across).
Printing food in 3D isn't quite practical in most places, at least not yet. But there's one place where it could make a major meal-making difference: in space.
Three-dimensional printers could let friends and family on Earth transmit recipes to break the tedium. Storage-space-wise, 3D printers could allow for a wide variety of dishes without having to stockpile pieces of animal carcasses and heaps of vegetables.
But there's one more important area—perhaps the most important area—where 3D food printing will need to improve to be a factor in the future of food, and that is taste. Lipton notes that some of the lab-grown, 3D printed meat stand-ins have been dubbed "shmeat,"
In ultrasonic agglomeration, high-frequency sound waves are projected at target particles, causing them to clump together. Careful modulation of the sound can be used to control how the fragmented food constituents bind together. So why go to all that trouble? 3D printing could allow scientists to create additional menu options that are sufficiently compact and stable to be packaged in MREs. That’s a big deal considering how hard it can be to adapt simple foods to MREs — the army only figured out how to make pizza workable last year.
Current military rations are not all that exciting.
The technology is still in the early stages right now. The Army is focusing on printing small, compact snack foods with ultrasonic agglomeration. That application makes the most sense with current technology, but researchers think it can be augmented with traditional 3D printing techniques to create more complicated and stable foods like pasta.
As the technology advances, meals could be custom generated for each soldier. For example, if your levels of vitamin D are low, your 3D-printed MRE might contain extra vitamin supplements. Right now ultrasonic 3D printers are experimental and confined to the lab. However, the day might come when a unit in the field could be outfitted with a 3D printer to create meals from bulk ingredients as needed with the tastes of the soldiers in mind. One person could print up some pasta and another has pizza. Giving the people what they want would probably result in much less waste as well. [Read: What is 3D printing?]
Researchers envision a future version of 3D food printing that might make it possible for soldiers to essentially forage for raw materials to feed into the printer. If that ever comes to pass, it could make combat units more flexible. Military technology often finds its way into the consumer space eventually, so perhaps one day you’ll have an ultrasonic food printer in your kitchen that churns out ravioli one minute and burgers the next — almost like a Star Trek-style replicator.
It is truly amazing what things are being discovered now! Check out the 2 articles below, for more information.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-us-army-wants-to-3d-print-customized-food-for-soldiers/ar-BBp0vlr