Express Your Healthy Side With a 3-D Food Printer

The Cornell Creative Machines Lab (CCML) intends to market 3-D food printing technology to restaurants and home chefs. As part of their marketing strategy, CCML will stress that 3-D food printers can provide families with the incentive to eat healthier diets via food shapes and designs.

Beyond decorative presentations, food printing can be used to create new flavors and forms of food. “It’s a huge design space, and the combination of tastes and textures, geometries and colors that can be achieved is enormous,” says Jeffrey Ian Lipton, head of the project at CCML.

People like to play with food, said Lipton. They like to express themselves in food. This allows them to express themselves in not just what the food is made of, but what its shaped like. We can make health food more fun, interesting, and appealing with this technology. What kid wouldn’t eat a space shuttle, even one made of peas?

Fast Company points out that with most of today’s 3-D food printing concepts the inks are the foods themselves in fluid form, like molten chocolate, cheese, or cookie dough. Foods such as meats and vegetables are ground and mixed with other liquids to create fresh, new food-inks.

The newest 3-D food printer under construction can produce miniature space shuttle-shaped scallop nuggets and cakes or cookies that display dates, initials or a corporate logo when sliced. They can also produce hamburger patties with liquid layers of ketchup and mustard, or a vegan hamburger substitute.

Lipton has developed a new printing technique called stochastic printing or squiggle printing that allows the printer to change the texture of the food being printed. The food crumples and weaves as it comes out of the syringe instead of oozing out in a straight line.

Using corn masa dough, the CCML lab team printed a new form of corn chip in the shape of a flower that can be evenly deep fried. “If it were solid you would burn the outside before the inside was fried,” says Lipton. “By making it porous we can deep fry the whole thing at the same time. Therefore we can make much larger objects to deep fry.”

“Foods that aren’t considered food will become food in the future,” says Homaro Cantu, executive chef at the Moto Restaurant in Chicago. “The fact is Americans will never give up their cheeseburgers and French fries, so we need to replace them with healthy raw ingredients.

Essential Dynamics, a tech startup in New York, plans a commercial version of the 3-D food printer that will retail for $1,000. Essential Dynamics founder Jamil Yosefzai believes the attraction of customizing foods will make 3-D food printers an essential part of everyone’s kitchen.

Companies like CCML and Essential Dynamics would like you to believe 3-D food printers will become as commonplace as microwave ovens in the kitchen, but until the cost of 3-D food printers is dramatically reduced, and the ease of use scaled way down, 3-D food printers will be kitchen playthings for the wealthier foodies among us, and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills crowd.