Picture of Success

BBC: The Printed Future of Food

By: Lakshmi Sandhana

The team at Cornell University’s Computational Synthesis Lab (CCSL) are building a 3D food printer, as part of the bigger Fab@home project, which they hope one day will be as commonplace as the microwave oven or blender.

Just pop the raw food “inks” in the top, load the recipe - or ‘FabApp’ - and the machine would do the rest.

“FabApps would allow you to tweak your foods taste, texture and other properties,” says Dr Jeffrey Ian Lipton, who leads the project.

“Maybe you really love biscuits, but want them extra flaky. You would change the slider and the recipe and the instructions would adjust accordingly.”

The goal is to blow the lid off cooking as we know it and change the future of food production.

People lacking even basic culinary skills could download the recipe files of master chefs or print out nutrition-packed dishes recommended by their doctors.

Chefs could also create new foodstuffs and customizable menus for fussy customers.

And it would have the added benefit of cutting out some of the waste of current food production methods, says Homaro Cantu, chef and owner of the Moto Restaurant in Chicago, Illinois, who has printed sushi using an ink jet printer.

“Imagine being able to essentially ‘grow’, ‘cook’ or prepare foods without the negative industrial impact - everything from fertilizers to saute pans and even packaging,” he says.

“The production chain requirements for food would nearly be eliminated.”

Local food, could really mean local.

“You can imagine a 3D printer making homemade apple pie without the need for farming the apples, fertilizing, transporting, refrigerating, packaging, fabricating, cooking, serving and the need for all of the materials in these processes like cars, trucks, pans, coolers, etc,” he adds.

While other researchers have toyed with the idea of printing food - notably at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - the Fab@home team is actively working on creating an affordable syringe-based 3D printer that can print a wide variety of foods.

The current design is basically a series of precise syringes that deposits food inks line by line, and layer by layer, according to an electronic blueprint.

The blueprint specifies exactly what materials go where and are currently drawn up using traditional engineering computer aided design (CAD) software.

“In the future there would probably be a kind of ‘ChefCAD’ that will allow people to design their own food constructions,” said Professor Hod Lipson, Director of CCSL.

“You’d hit the print button and it would ask you how many copies,” said Prof Lipson.

The raw materials used to print the food are currently limited to anything that can be extruded from a syringe. Commonly they are liquid or melted versions of ingredients, including chocolate, cookie dough, cheese, or cake batter.

However, the team are now experimenting with mixing foods with hydrocolloids - substances that form gels with water, generally used to thicken food products - to create a range of basic liquid ingredients.

They also recognize that people will want to create their own inks, allowing everyone to become Willy Wonka.

This creates its own problems.

“Each material will behave differently,” says Dr Lipton.

The solution would be to create a machine that constantly examines what it is printing, tweaking the design and mixture of raw ingredients as it goes.

“I feel like both approaches will be used going forward,” he says. “In situations where you want complete control over the food intact and properties - hospitals, space flight, personal dieting - people will use the hydrocolloids approach.

When doing home cooking you want to be able to use your own hand-made ingredients and feedback will be the only solution.”

The team has already had some success with their prototypes, creating cookies with embedded letters and designer domes made of turkey meat.

They hope to make their designs and ingredients list more complex, and able to handle food that people want to eat.

“Imagine if the microwave oven worked only with frozen pre cooked hot dogs when it first came out - no one would have them now,” says Dr Lipton.

Long-term, the team believes that people will take to the technology by creating their own 3D printable food recipe social networks with everyone improving on each other’s creations.

“3D printing will do for food what e-mail and instant messaging did for communication,” says Mr Cantu.

“What if you could have mom’s homemade apple pie sent via e-mail and printed up at home? Her apple pie becomes as close as an instant message on Facebook.”

(Source: BBC)

LA TIMES: ALL Red Meat is Bad For You

Eating red meat — any amount and any type — appears to significantly increase the risk of premature death, according to a long-range study that examined the eating habits and health of more than 110,000 adults for more than 20 years.

For instance, adding just one 3-ounce serving of unprocessed red meat — picture a piece of steak no bigger than a deck of cards — to one’s daily diet was associated with a 13% greater chance of dying during the course of the study.

Even worse, adding an extra daily serving of processed red meat, such as a hot dog or two slices of bacon, was linked to a 20% higher risk of death during the study.

“Any red meat you eat contributes to the risk,” said An Pan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and lead author of the study, published online Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Crunching data from thousands of questionnaires that asked people how frequently they ate a variety of foods, the researchers also discovered that replacing red meat with other foods seemed to reduce mortality risk for study participants.

Eating a serving of nuts instead of beef or pork was associated with a 19% lower risk of dying during the study. The team said choosing poultry or whole grains as a substitute was linked with a 14% reduction in mortality risk; low-fat dairy or legumes, 10%; and fish, 7%.

Previous studies had associated red meat consumption with diabetes, heart disease and cancer, all of which can be fatal. Scientists aren’t sure exactly what makes red meat so dangerous, but the suspects include the iron and saturated fat in beef, pork and lamb, the nitrates used to preserve them, and the chemicals created by high-temperature cooking.

The Harvard researchers hypothesized that eating red meat would also be linked to an overall risk of death from any cause, Pan said. And the results suggest they were right: Among the 37,698 men and 83,644 women who were tracked, as meat consumption increased, so did mortality risk.

In separate analyses of processed and unprocessed meats, the group found that both types appear to hasten death. Pan said that at the outset, he and his colleagues had thought it likely that only processed meat posed a health danger.

Carol Koprowski, a professor of preventive medicine at USC’s Keck School of Medicine who wasn’t involved in the research, cautioned that it can be hard to draw specific conclusions from a study like this because there can be a lot of error in the way diet information is recorded in food frequency questionnaires, which ask subjects to remember past meals in sometimes grueling detail.

But Pan said the bottom line was that there was no amount of red meat that’s good for you.

“If you want to eat red meat, eat the unprocessed products, and reduce it to two or three servings a week,” he said. “That would have a huge impact on public health.”

A majority of people in the study reported that they ate an average of at least one serving of meat per day.

Pan said that he eats one or two servings of red meat per week, and that he doesn’t eat bacon or other processed meats.

Cancer researcher Lawrence H. Kushi of the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in Oakland said that groups putting together dietary guidelines were likely to pay attention to the findings in the study.

“There’s a pretty strong supposition that eating red meat is important — that it should be part of a healthful diet,” said Kushi, who was not involved in the study. “These data basically demonstrate that the less you eat, the better.”

UC San Francisco researcher and vegetarian diet advocate Dr. Dean Ornish said he gleaned a hopeful message from the study.

“Something as simple as a meatless Monday can help,” he said. “Even small changes can make a difference.”

Additionally, Ornish said, “What’s good for you is also good for the planet.”

In an editorial that accompanied the study, Ornish wrote that a plant-based diet could help cut annual healthcare costs from chronic diseases in the U.S., which exceed $1 trillion. Shrinking the livestock industry could also reduce greenhouse gas emissions and halt the destruction of forests to create pastures, he wrote.

Edible Insects: Coming to a Grocery Store Near You!

A new London-based startup company, ENTO, is attempting to get Westerners to eat insects as a regular part of their diet within the next ten years. 

ENTO believes that introducing insects into a Western diet would help our growing hunger crisis as well as benefit the environment since farming and harvesting insects takes very little water and transport fuel compared to livestock, grains and even vegetables. It is also more efficient than raising cattle.  One hundred pounds of feed produces 10 pounds of beef, whereas the same amount of feed would produce more than four times that amount in crickets. .If America and Europe got on board, insects could help to provide a sustainable food source for the future.  Not to mention that they are great source of protein and are very vitamin rich!

By using clever marking and aesthetically pleasing packaging, the founders of ENTO plan on breaking the cultural barriers based on the common Western idea that insects are “gross” or “dirty.”  They have adapted a “playful and futuristic” look in an “Asian subtext” and grind up the bugs so they can be cleverly disguised in cubes and accompanied with compatible flavors.

To learn more about ENTO check out their website at http://cargocollective.com/ento

Personally, I think I would be more willing to try eating insects if they weren’t ground up and hidden… that just seems deceiving and I would rather know what I was getting myself into, but that’s just me.

I’m dying to know what other people think about ENTO? Do you think they can pull it off?  Would you be willing to try insects in your diet?

I’m thinking about taking up running again while I’m on Spring Break. Maybe I’ll randomly like it now?