Want a pizza? Just print it up.

[TechMan]

NASA-Funded 3D Food Printer Creates Edible Pizza

In 2013, NASA funded the Systems and Material Research Corporation, located in Austin, TX, and its Engineer Anjan Contractor, to create a 3D food printer. In this video, Contractor shows us the printer in action, layering dough, sauce, and cheese one on top of the other. Here’s a picture of the finished “product,” which was cooked in about 70 seconds.

Read more at http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2014/01/28/nasa-funded-3d-food-printer-creates-edible-pizza-video/#xQfpTH1ve8EEHHco.99


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ISXqC-YPnpc

[T.O.M.]

How long until we have Star Trek replicators?  Seems to be the road we're heading down...

[MechAg94]

If you have the dough, sauce, and cheese, do you really need a printer to make it for you?  I hate to think what they had to do to the dough to be able to run it through a machine like that.

I thought in the original Star Trek, they just hit buttons and out popped a tray of food. 

[geronimotwo]

If you have the dough, sauce, and cheese, do you really need a printer to make it for you?  I hate to think what they had to do to the dough to be able to run it through a machine like that.

I thought in the original Star Trek, they just hit buttons and out popped a tray of food. 

i always thought of it as a mini "transporter", for food dna rather than human.

it will get much more interesting when the printer gets down to using basic elactron, protons and neutrons to assemble the food molecules, inserting the energy needed for instant hot food.

[KD5NRH]

If you have the dough, sauce, and cheese, do you really need a printer to make it for you?  I hate to think what they had to do to the dough to be able to run it through a machine like that.

Yup.  I'd have to say this thing makes about as much sense as a CNC milkshake maker.

[AZRedhawk44]

I thought in the original Star Trek, they just hit buttons and out popped a tray of food. 

How did it work in the original Star Trek?  I know what TNG/DS9/Voyager did with replicators.  Basically transporter tech, but it converted raw energy into refined matter.

[Ben]

How did it work in the original Star Trek?  I know what TNG/DS9/Voyager did with replicators.  Basically transporter tech, but it converted raw energy into refined matter.

Did not work well at all in TOS.

[AZRedhawk44]

So, this thing has 3 nozzles:  dough, marinara, and cheese (cheez? provel? velveeta?).

I guess it might be possible to decrease the dough aperture and have it print a bunch of small straight lines for spaghetti, then cook the noodles and finally dispense warmed marinara onto it for a second dish, and maybe it could even do a primitive lasagna... but it has 3 print heads for 3 ingredients.  It's the "italian" machine.

How many print heads would it take to have a machine that could make:
1. pizza
2. tacos
3. cheeseburger
4. french fries
5. chef salad

Even if I granted the extraordinary boon to the developers of using a "soy" tube for all meat/protein products (which I wouldn't! ), the prototype above would need considerable extension to produce all 5 of these menu items.  And that's a menu of 5 things.  You'd need at least 50 items to keep people from food boredom.

This has a LOOOONG ways to go, and that's disregarding the problems you'll have in a zero-gee environment.  I'd like to see this printer operate on NASA's zero-gee simulation aircraft, and what the product looks like after that.

[Firethorn]

How did it work in the original Star Trek?  I know what TNG/DS9/Voyager did with replicators.  Basically transporter tech, but it converted raw energy into refined matter.

'Protein resequencers'.  Basically the middle ground between this printer and the replicators of TNG.  Take raw foodstocks that may not be something you really want to think about, printing at the molecular level, not atomic. 

You're probably not getting fresh lettuce, but pizza, sausages, lasagna, burgers(just not BLTs), soups, breads, etc...

I'd imagine that early generation ST crews had to put up with food that, while excellent compared to what astronauts consume today, was still radically different than food on planets, designed to play to the strengths of their food prep systems.

[lupinus]

Heck even later "real food" was a something special or sought after. I think in a way, similar but less nutty, to the organic thing today.

The episode where Picard visits his brother in France, for example, mention was made about real stuff as opposed to replicated food. I seem to remember more TNG references but they escape me at the moment. Or in DS9 with the restaurant owned by Sisko's father I believe mention was made there also. Even in Voyager Neelix was often bumping crew moral with fresh foods taken on at their various stops and cooking fresh food. And even in TNG and DS9, there always seemed to be a cook around serving food too. So even the Enterprise was probably taking on fresh supplies and/or replicating simpler base items as ingredients to be used for actual cooking by an actual person. So I always looked at the advances from the period of TOS to the TNG/DS9/Voyager period (keeping in mind there was some decent overlap between the three in terms of the ST universe) meaning replicated food got a lot more palatable, but still didn't hold up compared to the real thing. It was an option sure, kind of like fast food or frozen today, but fresh was still better tasting.

[Azrael256]

If you have the dough, sauce, and cheese, do you really need a printer to make it for you?  I hate to think what they had to do to the dough to be able to run it through a machine like that.

I think they may have deliberately selected a food that was 1 - familiar to the kind of geek who would find this interesting and 2 - relatively easy to assemble and already comprised of discrete layers.  Duck a l'orange is still in beta.