3-D Printable Food Gets Funding From NASA

cervesaebraciator writes "According to Quartz, '[Anjan Contractor's] Systems & Materials Research Corporation just got a six month, $125,000 grant from NASA to create a prototype of his universal food synthesizer. But Contractor, a mechanical engineer with a background in 3-D printing, envisions a much more mundane — and ultimately more important — use for the technology. He sees a day when every kitchen has a 3-D printer, and the earth's 12 billion people feed themselves customized, nutritionally-appropriate meals synthesized one layer at a time, from cartridges of powder and oils they buy at the corner grocery store. Contractor's vision would mean the end of food waste, because the powder his system will use is shelf-stable for up to 30 years, so that each cartridge, whether it contains sugars, complex carbohydrates, protein or some other basic building block, would be fully exhausted before being returned to the store.' No word yet on whether anyone other than the guy trying to sell the technology thinks it'll make palatable food."

Comments

Tea Earl Grey Hot

[Hsien-Ko]

The replicator!!!

Re:Tea Earl Grey Hot

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Push button.
2. Nom.
3. Nom.
4. Nom.
5. ...
6. Profit!

Re:Tea Earl Grey Hot

[optikos]

No, its the pastel glop served at the restaurant during the restaurant in the 1985 Terry Gilliam film _Brazil_.

Re:Tea Earl Grey Hot

[Anonymous Coward]

i am so done with inkjet cartridges...

Re:Tea Earl Grey Hot

[Ken_g6]

Wrong Trek. This stuff looks more like these food cube things from TOS.

Of course, this is only the 21st century.

Re:Tea Earl Grey Hot

[Crudely_Indecent]

No, wait...make it Bergamot!

Re:Tea Earl Grey Hot

[hutsell]

No, its the pastel glop served at the restaurant during the restaurant in the 1985 Terry Gilliam film _Brazil_.

Will the cartridge's "glop" of powder and oils in its raw state have any digestible nutritional value? If not, until electrical power becomes ubiquitous and its corresponding failures guaranteed to be a thing of the distant past (it wasn't in Gilliam's Brazil) and one doesn't have access to a backup generator with a full tank, then it would be a good idea to keep some "real" food around, if it's still around. If it isn't, watching the neighbors might be necessary priority, especially if one doesn't have any "pets" to offer.

Re:Tea Earl Grey Hot

[The Snowman]

The replicator!!!

Not quite: https://campaign.soylent.me/soylent-free-your-body. What if you could feed your body everything it needed: nothing more, nothing less. I don't think 3D printing is required here, just powder plus water.

Re:Tea Earl Grey Hot

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn. Forgot to replace the Klingon food packs -- again.

Re:Tea Earl Grey Hot

[Macgrrl]

Dispensing Machine: Hello. How can I help you?

Cat: Fish!

Dispensing Machine: Today's fish is Trout a la creme, enjoy your meal.

Cat: Fish!

Dispensing Machine: Today's fish is Trout a la creme, enjoy your meal.

Cat: Fish!

Dispensing Machine: Today's fish is Trout a la creme, enjoy your meal.

Cat: Fish!

Dispensing Machine: Today's fish is Trout a la creme, enjoy your meal.

Cat: Fish!

Dispensing Machine: Today's fish is Trout a la creme, enjoy your meal.

Cat: Fish!

Dispensing Machine: Today's fish is Trout a la creme, enjoy your meal.

Cat: I will.

Almost there

[ArcadeMan]

We already eat foods that could be stored for years.

But I still prefer to dry-freeze them in blocks and then cut them up on my CNC into regular food shapes.

Re:Almost there

[Cosgrach]

You can then sell the chippings to the other guys to use in their printers

Re:Almost there

[CanHasDIY]

Now why do I have a sudden hankerin' for pork-flavored apples?

Re:Almost there

[Culture20]

Leela: And that sandwich you're eating is made out of old, discarded sandwiches. Nothing just gets thrown away.
Fry: The future is disgusting!

Re:Almost there

[newcastlejon]

Because you've run out of "oysters"?

Re:Almost there

[Anonymous Coward]

Next step: Eatable gun! You can eat away the evidence. :P

Re: Almost there

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm on a diet. My doctor suggested i reduce my meals to 40 percent infill and 700 e-steps per mm instead of 900.

Re:Almost there

[Genda]

Talk about explosive flatulence!

What about..

[sjwt]

I hope it has a way to print a decent texture.. I would prefer not to live off mush.

Re:What about..

[Anonymous Coward]

Why bake when you can extrude?

Re:What about..

[Anonymous Coward]

Texture will come. Early models and techniques probably won't be all that jaw dropping, but give it time. Fifty years should do it. Fifty years of actual development and use... That's the hard part.

Chicken and egg.

Re:What about..

[ModernGeek]

I would image one could accomplish that by heating certain parts of the food more so than others while it prints the material.

Re:What about..

[Anonymous Coward]

Other than the general unpleasantness of having to live off of mush, it actually is very important for people to eat a variety of food, and develop their jaw muscles. It is not atypical for those who live off of highly processed diets to have slurred speech, general difficulty speaking, or other speech impediments, because they have weak jaw muscles, and cannot open their mouths.

Re:What about..

[Anonymous Coward]

BS

Re:What about..

[Anonymous Coward]

Somehow I think this could work if there are edible glues that can be mixed to varying consistencies, from hard and crunchy, to fatty, to gooey. Printing a pattern of crunchy for example would be like a crispy texture, Printing rippled layers of thick gooey with layers of fatty would be not unlike meat.

Re:What about..

[Smauler]

You may well be able to imagine that.... but at our present technology, what you get from heating one bit more than another is one hot bit and one cold bit.

Texture is independent of heat... The use of heat in cooking will create different textures, but the texture essentially comes from the base material, although carbonised black goo you can pretty much make with any starting material - generally this is considered a mistake.

Re:What about..

[Genda]

"If you close your eyes, it almost feels like your eating runny eggs." -- Mouse

"It's a single cell protein combined with synthetic aminos, vitamins, and minerals. Everything the body needs." -- Dozer

Re:What about..

[Genda]

Here's a little extrusion... just for you!

Re:What about..

[Genda]

Yeah, instead you want to lay down fine layers of ingredients the expose it to a high frequency standing wave to mix materials at the antinodes. You introduce fibers and sheets of material this way and create all kinds of density changes giving it very complex structure. I want something that could print Sushi!

Re:What about..

[sociocapitalist]

I hope it has a way to print a decent texture.. I would prefer not to live off mush.

Don't worry it will still taste like chicken

Re:What about..

[Macgrrl]

Why do I think someone will connect this to blow jobs and how they are an important part of an exercise routine and speech therapy.

Growing up my sister was prescribed ice creams to eat by licking to exercise her tongue due to a speech impediment.

Only Terrorists

[Anonymous Coward]

Would want to print food.

Expect Monsanto to go to congress soon to try to restrict 3D printing.

Re:Only Terrorists

[dadelbunts]

Exactly. With this new 3d printing technology people will now want to MAKE FOOD AT HOME! My god! We need to make it so its strictly regulated and people can only get food from government approved sites.

Re:Only Terrorists

[Anonymous Coward]

just shut up

Re:Only Terrorists

[just_a_monkey]

Who do you think will be the only ones able to handle the regulatory burden that comes with producing the raw materials for this machine? Also, National Health Ministries will have a field day with this. Now they can finally monitor and make sure that all citizens eat healtily and according to regulations and recommendations every day.

Re:Only Terrorists

[Genda]

On the contrary, They'd come up with a whole new bunch of GenMod crops to corner the Ag part of printable foods and then lobby Congress to make certain that only their crop could be used in the making of printed food.

Re:Only Terrorists

[Genda]

That and they can add G23 Paxeline Hydrochloride to the food powders to calm the population and weed out aggression. I wonder if there'll be any side effects? Nah!

Re:Only Terrorists

[VortexCortex]

We need to make it so its strictly regulated and people can only get food from government approved sites.

?! Are you and the mods fucking double retarded? Grow you some wheat, dumbass.

Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942), was a United States Supreme Court decision that recognized the power of the federal government to regulate economic activity.

A farmer, Roscoe Filburn, was growing wheat for on-farm consumption in Ohio. The U.S. government had established limits on wheat production based on acreage owned by a farmer, in order to drive up wheat prices during the Great Depression, and Filburn was growing more than the limits permitted. Filburn was ordered to destroy his crops and pay a fine, even though he was producing the excess wheat for his own use and had no intention of selling it.

Now just imagine how fucking moronic you sound to me.

This is against current food movements.

[Anonymous Coward]

This will sell to lazy people of the same breed who buy pod coffee machines for home use.

There is an ever growing movement of people who don't want to eat anything that has loose synthetic origin or contains any "chemicals".

I'd rather just have a rooftop garden and compost all the waste. It's also zero-waste and is a lot more appealing, tasty and rewarding than tech like this ever could be.

Sounds like it could catch on for remote areas or situations where growing food is difficult, but otherwise it seems like a step in the wrong direction.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

There is an ever growing movement of people who don't want to eat anything that has loose synthetic origin or contains any "chemicals".

I know that the green movement is sort of radical at times, but does this mean they are taking it literally and want to photosynthesize?

...hmm, on the other hand, think of the Orion babes...

Re:This is against current food movements.

[h4rr4r]

Please tell me what this chemical free food is?

Make sure there is none of that dihydrogen monoxide in it, that stuff is lethal.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[shaitand]

"There is an ever growing movement of people who don't want to eat anything that has loose synthetic origin or contains any "chemicals"."

People use pod coffee machines because they are easy, don't waste coffee, produce better tasting coffee and the coffee is no more synthetic or loaded with chemicals than any other.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[Anonymous Coward]

a lot more appealing, tasty and rewarding than tech like this ever could be.

How do you know that for a fact? How do you know that eventually, we won't be able to produce any texture you can think of? How do you know that eventually these printers won't be able to produce any taste you can think of? Plus, this could be an actual boost in food safety, since our food will not come from living organisms ...

Printers used to be dot-matrix printers. They can now print beautiful photos very cheaply.

Our screens started by displaying very crude monochromatic pictures. They can now display beautiful 3D pictures at resolutions that become closer with time to the resolution of our own eyes.

3D printers used to be very crude. They can now print at the nanoscale. They improve every day. Maybe we will be able to print anything in the future...

Re:This is against current food movements.

[Cosgrach]

To take the rooftop garden a bit further -

Build a concrete shell home, complete with garage and bury the thing under a mound or earth four the six feet thick. If 'natural' light is needed, install light pipes. Garden on the roof - easy! This has the added bonus of being more thermally stable, and is a lot more durable when it comes to thinks like tornadoes.

Are there problems with this design? Sure, but the technology to do this exists today.

Getting rid of excess heat is the biggest problem, but if most of the things that generate the large heat loads (water heaters end refrigerators are the biggest) could be put in a 'hot room' the rest of the house would have a better time of keeping cool. In hot areas, going underground even a small amount can provide significant cooling. The other big issue would be drainage, but again proper engineering would solve most of the problems. I do admit that the central US is basically a giant flood plain, so there are some issues to work out.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[Anonymous Coward]

OP here. There is a reason I put "chemicals" in quotation marks. If you have never met people who fear "chemicals" and have no clue what that word actually means, you must be living under a rock.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Better tasting my foot. Its not bad, but its not the best coffee I've ever had.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[Spottywot]

I was about to post somthing like "Nice pod coffee machine you have there, shame if something happened to it." But really the reason that they are something I'd never buy, is that its totally dependant on the coffee pods being made by the manufacturer. I have a simple cafetiere and I can have whatever coffee I want, low maintainance, and I know I'll always be able to use it. Future proofing by going low tech..

Re:This is against current food movements.

[angel'o'sphere]

Chemical free food is food that does not contain chemicals that don't belong into the food, like: roundup, herbizides, fungizides, pestizides, DDT, recycled engine oil, dioxin, heavy metals ...

Sorry, but your question was a dumb one. You perfectly know what "ordinary" people consider a "chemical free food".

However if you are scared of dihydrogenmonoxyd perhaps make a course in chemistry. It would enlilght you about other "chemicals" which you likely might not want to have in your food, like antibiotica, arsen, random poisens, lead, mercury even iron or aluminium is dangerous etc. pe pe

Re:This is against current food movements.

[oPless]

Richard Stallman, is that you?

Re:This is against current food movements.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no such thing as chemical free food, and mentioning it never fails to make people look dumb. "Chemical" free food, means free of ingredients which cannot be pronounced by miseducated hippies.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[Anonymous Coward]

Had to look that one up. "Pod coffee" sounds like something you'd drink to evade the body snatchers, appropriately enough.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[skegg]

Mate, you can get a machine for under a hundred bucks, and the capsules are around 70 U.S. cents (give or take).

In my opinion, pod coffee is good. (Not great ... but good. Certainly better than soluble coffee.)

And with the convenience of having a couple of coffees at home / the office for under 2 bucks a day, while I'd be ticked off if the manufacturer ceased making the capsules in a year or 2, I wouldn't be starting a class action lawsuit.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[Anonymous Coward]

Even with that definition that people usually mean, it is dumb on a more fundamental level. It assumes that anything added must be bad and anything already there isn't. There are plenty of "natural" chemicals in various plants that are quite dangerous, either on the short or long time scales. And the energy and effort people expend over some things could be better directed elsewhere (at the very least so I don't have to hear another person complain about ascorbic acid being one of the evil things the companies must be added while staring at an ingredient list).

Still, describing a piece of produce as having zero chemicals is kind of a red flag for someone who didn't do a good job reading up on a subject, which kind of sucks for what seems like a very important issue for some people.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather just have a rooftop garden and compost all the waste. It's also zero-waste and is a lot more appealing, tasty and rewarding than tech like this ever could be.

You speak as if tech in the kitchen is mutually exclusive with growing your own food and composting waste. You could easily make such a device and fill it with stuff from your own garden, and still compost the waste. There are a lot of interesting materials with various textures that seem like they would have a chance to work with something like a 3d printer, especially if looked into some of the modern trends in cooking that use new and varied ways of thickening or shaping ingredients. I would say to look at some of the things that come under the heading "molecular gastronomy," but even just some of the tech that goes into fast food places can be adopted to do interesting things at home. Except at home, you put high quality ingredients in and none of the additives people complain about.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[lgw]

Worrying about food with chemicals in it is old school now. If you haven't heard, some food is now made with atoms. BAN ATOMIC FOOD.
   

Re:This is against current food movements.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I don't get the reference... I don't think anyone who really appreciates coffee prefers pod coffee. I was drinking a cup of it as I wrote that, so I'm not trying to be condescending. Its not bad, just not great. Much, much better than when we had a traditional drip coffee machine that nobody every cleaned.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[tragedy]

People use pod coffee machines because they ... produce better tasting coffee

Better than fresh ground coffee? I don't actually drink coffee myself. I actually feel slightly nauseated when the aroma is particularly strong. But it seems fairly obvious that coffee that has already been ground up and left to sit in a packet for weeks or months is not going to taste as fresh as a bean that has just been ground up.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[Cwix]

They make a reusable filter for the thing
http://www.amazon.com/Keurig-K-Cup-Reusable-Coffee-Filter/dp/B000DLB2FI

Shoot at 6 bucks you could get a couple and prefill them the night before.

I like it because I never drink an entire pot of coffee, but you cant beat the simplicity of a 20 dollar coffee maker.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[blackpaw]

This will sell to lazy people of the same breed who buy pod coffee machines for home use.

There is an ever growing movement of people who don't want to eat anything that has loose synthetic origin or contains any "chemicals".

Coffee pod machines use std ground coffee with no additives, they in fact operate just the same as an espresso at a coffee shop, just with prepackaged coffee grounds. They produce real espresso with considerably less additives than instant.

Do you make the same critiques against Tea Bags?

Re:This is against current food movements.

[shaitand]

As good or better depending on the blend. I used to keep a grinder and fresh grind for each pot. At one point I had Kona shipped direct from the plantation, roasted a weeks worth at a time manually and ground that fresh daily.

The sealed pod keeps the coffee fresh. The pressurized system forcing the hot water through the grounds and making each cup fresh makes a huge difference. Especially on the second or third cup of the day.

Toss in creme fresh and real sugar and you are looking at a great cup of coffee every time. Of course it depends on the variety. Surprisingly the Starbucks varieties are actually quite good. They taste like burnt crap if you go to an actual Starbucks.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[mug funky]

foreveralone.jpg

Re:This is against current food movements.

[mug funky]

you jest, but a lot of food that is traded internationally gets a good dose of gamma rays in order to clear quarantine.

though i'm not completely against this, it is enough to disqualify a food from being "organic", and hence reduces it's possible retail value.

only steam is good enough for organic foods - at least they've somewhat made it into the industrial age :)

Re:This is against current food movements.

[mug funky]

(of course, food that's insufficiently sterilized stands a good chance of spoiling on you... it's never good to find that 50kg bag of spices is now so completely mouldy that it's unfit for consumption... and also infected with an exotic mould that's a possible biosecurity hazard, so you have to burn it all).

Re:This is against current food movements.

[mug funky]

this.

it's a convenient delivery method, and the design allows cheaper components to reach higher pressures, thus giving a better crema.

sealing them off this way also keeps the coffee fresh longer, and the doses are measured and calibrated for the machine in question - it's idiot proof, at least until the machine fails.

the only thing making it "not great" is the coffee used, and there's plenty to choose from.

snobs will be snobs, but the pod system has clear advantages. overpackaging is a problem.

me, i roast my own because i like getting chaff all over the house, and i like the eerily "cinema foyer from the 80s" smell you get. but i can't say the results are perfect, or even approaching consistent. i do it because i want to get good at it. if i just want good coffee i get it elsewhere.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[GLMDesigns]

Think of the 1000s of people who die every year from dihydrogen monoxide and nothing is done about it. The shame of it.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[Smauler]

You do know agriculture is a human invention, don't you? And that since the dawn of agriculture, people have been putting all kinds of shit (literally) on their food to make it grow. None of this was "natural".

Herbicides and fungicides and insecticides exist in the "organic" plants we eat. They're just ones produced by the plant. Most of our synthetic ones are basically copies of pre-existing natural defences. Sticking some of the natural world's produce into our food would go very badly for us...

Re:This is against current food movements.

[angel'o'sphere]

HÃ? Do you think anyone understands this?

So a plant that just grows and never was treated with "*zids" has the smae stuff in it (or on it?) like a plant that was treated with 6 different kinds of "*zids"?

Yeah, likely. Hm, ther more I think about it, the more likely it becomes. I should go to my fridge and trash the BIO vegetables instantly.

And go to my cellar and trash my bio wine.

Oh for fuck sake, and what about my beer that I brew with my BIO grains ...

Let me ask again: bio or organic food is tainted with the same herbizides/fungizides or other *zides as "ordinary" food? How retarded are you?

Re:This is against current food movements.

[Smauler]

Real coffee aficionados say that it's not the grinding that's the problem - it's the roasting. Green, unroasted beans keep for a long time. Once you roast them, though, they're only good for a few days, whether you grind them first or later.

Personally, I'm yet to be convinced. I buy beans and grind them... but I'm pretty sure that's just because I buy beans and like grinding them (it's a good ritual). I've not noticed much difference in the taste.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[Smauler]

I'm not the OP, nor am I a coffee snob...

However, teabags are an abomination the world has embraced for convenience. When you drink tea with a teabag, you get some of the taste of tea, but you get all of the taste of bag.

I don't like the taste of bag. I don't want bag in my tea.

Cheap, dust grade loose leaf tea tastes 100 times better than _anything_ from a bag. Decent tea is relatively cheap too.

Ok, rant over....

Re:This is against current food movements.

[Anonymous Coward]

The reference is to richard stallman eating something from his foot, google it. I personally don't care to see it again so i'll leave it up to you to find the video.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[funwithBSD]

Photosynthesis requires....

CHEMICALS!

Re:This is against current food movements.

[Smauler]

Let me ask again: bio or organic food is tainted with the same herbizides/fungizides or other *zides as "ordinary" food?

They're not "tainted" with the same herbicides or fungicides.... my point was that just about every crop we grow and use has herbicides and fungicides in it - and those have been exaggerated because of our breeding of the crops. Nothing we eat is natural, unless you're a hunter gatherer.

How retarded are you?

Not retarded enough to miss someone else's point. I do buy local, and I do grow my own stuff. I occasionally use fungicides and other stuff on the crops I grow. I sell them locally. They're not organic, but they're local, and as long as you steam wash them for 2 hours prior to eating, they should be ok.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[Anonymous Coward]

only steam is good enough for organic foods - at least they've somewhat made it into the industrial age :)

Then it's good now we have steam for Linux :D

Re:This is against current food movements.

[Genda]

I think he's talking about that chemist's wet dream that is the label of most heavily processed junk food.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[necro81]

and Brawndo's got electrolytes. It's what plants crave.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[XxtraLarGe]

I don't think anyone who really appreciates coffee prefers pod coffee. I was drinking a cup of it as I wrote that, so I'm not trying to be condescending. Its not bad, just not great.

Unless you have some sort of magic way of judging if someone really appreciates coffee, it is being condescending, just like audiophiles or wine snobs in their respective fields of "expertise". I really appreciate coffee, and I prefer k-cups because of cost, convenience and variety.

Yes, there are many sub-standard k-cups out there, but there are some really excellent ones as well. My personal favorite is Jet Fuel. It is a very strong, rich-bodied coffee. It is better than anything I can get at Bigby, Starbucks, Seattle's Best, Caribou, etc., for a small fraction of the price. Most people I've shared it with really like it. There may indeed be better coffees out there, but the

Re:This is against current food movements.

[XxtraLarGe]

(My previous post somehow got truncated, continuing here). There may indeed be better coffees out there, but the cost of them is more than I am willing to pay, so my preference is based partly on quality, partly based on price. K-cups may be significantly more expensive than using a drip coffee maker, but the coffee is much better quality, so I am willing to pay the extra cost for it.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[angel'o'sphere]

Crops that are grown without herbicides etc. obviously can not be tainted by them, did you miss this?

So how do you come to the idea that every food is contaminated by them?

Re:This is against current food movements.

[rocket rancher]

I was about to post somthing like "Nice pod coffee machine you have there, shame if something happened to it." But really the reason that they are something I'd never buy, is that its totally dependant on the coffee pods being made by the manufacturer. I have a simple cafetiere and I can have whatever coffee I want, low maintainance, and I know I'll always be able to use it. Future proofing by going low tech..

Not totally dependent on it at all. You *can* use your own coffee in a pod machine -- every brand of pod machine I've ever purchased came with an adapter to allow the use of your own coffee, including my decade-old Keurig Platinum. I've been hosting bi-weekly cuppings at a local coffee market for three years, comparing various pod machines with a cafetiere (french press, for the non-cognoscenti) and the results are pretty unequivocal - only one person has ever correctly differentiated the brew processes, and that person was a ringer, a Level 2 master roaster from the Roasters Guild. :)

Re:This is against current food movements.

[Anonymous Coward]

What a lot of people who base their complaints on emotion and lack of depth of knowledge (and a few people without reading comprehension too it seems...) seem to ignore, is that plants contain a lot of compounds that evolved for the purpose of combating insects, and even weeds. Just because you added nothing to the plant doesn't mean that plant isn't creating various things itself. It depends heavily on the kind of plant, and even the particular variation, with some bread varieties being worse than originals, or visa versa. Breeding has reduced the amount of solanine and chaconine in potatoes, but increased nicotine in eggplants, pyrethrin in chrysanthemums (used in Asian cuisine), and so on. Those examples given have been used as pesticides, and have had artificial analogues made of them. And not only can some plants produce such compounds, because they come from a plant, they are or had been allowed to be used on food labeled as organic (nicotine for example can still be used on organic plants for another year, until the manufacturer's permit will not be renewed).

There is a fundamental issue with the mentality that natural must be good and artificial must be bad. Instead of trying to look at what is actually dangerous or not (even with a super conservative approach that defaults to not safe), people have made a false generalization that causes them to waste time fighting some things that are not dangerous while missing a large number of things that are.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[rocket rancher]

Real coffee aficionados say that it's not the grinding that's the problem - it's the roasting. Green, unroasted beans keep for a long time. Once you roast them, though, they're only good for a few days, whether you grind them first or later.

Personally, I'm yet to be convinced. I buy beans and grind them... but I'm pretty sure that's just because I buy beans and like grinding them (it's a good ritual). I've not noticed much difference in the taste.

Yes, but if you want to preserve your coffee in quantity, keeping a a sack of beans around is probably not the best way. :) Try a simple ice-drip -- brewed coffee gets it flavor from oils extracted from the bean during the brewing process, but not all oils contribute equally to the flavor. Coffee goes bad in much the same way that butter and cooking oil go bad -- coffee will go rancid because it contains oils that degrade when exposed to heat and oxygen. The ice-drip brewing process removes most of those oils, and the result is a brew that will keep almost indefinitely in your 'fridge. You can nuke it or steam it up a bit if you like it hot. I host cuppings at a local coffee market, and people invariably are surprised when I tell them that delicious cuppa they just rated as excellent had been sitting in my 'fridge for a year. It definitely helps me sell ice-drip systems. :)

Re:This is against current food movements.

[AthanasiusKircher]

Crops that are grown without herbicides etc. obviously can not be tainted by them, did you miss this?

GP didn't.

So how do you come to the idea that every food is contaminated by them?

I'm pretty sure GP isn't talking about "contamination." There are loads of "natural" herbicidal and fungicidal things that are part of human agriculture, long before modern "chemicals" were used for this process. Farmers for thousands of years gradually figured out practices that would grow fewer weeds while increasing yield.

The plants evolved along with this -- and farmers selected the ones that could outcompete and even actively resist weeds and fungi, because those were the crops that did the best.

There was a lot of "natural" genetic engineering going on in selective breeding, and "natural" herbicidal and fungicidal outcomes that were created by farming techniques -- soil preparation, time of year/frequency of planting or soil tending, etc.

In the end, all of our crops today have been inherently modified from the "natural" wild plants, so GP's point holds -- unless you're a hunter-gatherer, you are eating food that has been engineered to grow in ways that it generally wouldn't "naturally," Some part of that has to do with plants that have gradually evolved to outcompete and even discourage growth of weeds (herbicide) and resist disease (fungicide).

Re:This is against current food movements.

[angel'o'sphere]

We did not talk about "engineered" or breeded (bread?) food.

We talked about chemical free food. And he came with an "dihydrogenmonoxid" pseudo argument.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[AthanasiusKircher]

I don't think anyone who really appreciates coffee prefers pod coffee.

Unless you have some sort of magic way of judging if someone really appreciates coffee, it is being condescending, just like audiophiles or wine snobs in their respective fields of "expertise".

Thanks for this. I completely agree. People who make statements like, "anyone who really appreciates X must understand the value of Y" generally haven't realized that our whole cultural value system is just constructed. Certain "lore" becomes accepted. Despite the fact that a whole generation of people are growing up who actually prefer the constrainted sound of mp3s and multiple scientific studies have shown that wine "experts" can't generally tell the difference between supposedly "great" wines and mediocre ones at a rate above chance, the audio and wine snobs keep up their rhetoric as the people "in the know" who should determine "what is best" for all of us.

I personally think the freshly made coffee at some local coffee shops tastes better than anything I've ever brewed myself and a lot better than any coffee I've ever had made from a pod or K-cup. But that's my opinion, and I'm not going to judge you for yours.

On a more extreme scale, some people do like Big Macs better than some "gourmet" hamburger made at a fancy restaurant, or they might like Kraft mac & cheese better than many homemade baked varieties. I really don't think anyone should have to apologize for their tastes -- and for the Big Mac afficionado, they may actually know that some McDonalds restaurants make better tasting ones than others.

People like what they like. And I don't think someone should have to try to justify his or her experience. It's okay to like coffee made from a pod, and it's even okay to like some kind of dinner made from a box. (Whether any of this is "healthy" or "healthier" is a separate question -- I'm just talking about taste and enjoyment.)

Many people just feel somehow justified when their opinions mesh with the so-called "experts."

Re:This is against current food movements.

[h4rr4r]

No such food exists.

It might be parts per trillion, but that stuff is everywhere. Much like all filtered beer contains trace amounts of arsenic.
The last 4 of those are as likely to be found in your home garden as commercial produce. Heck, more likely in your home garden.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[h4rr4r]

That is a very unusual way to spell idiots.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[Spottywot]

Thanks for that, I consider myself re-educated on the subject of pod machines. If I ever get bought one as a present I won't have to smile through gritted teeth as I say thankyou!

Re:This is against current food movements.

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me get this straight. Your 50kg bag of 'spices' was contaminated with an 'exotic mold', so you had to 'burn it all'.

In small doses, wrapped in little bits of paper, right?

Re:This is against current food movements.

[Anonymous Coward]

We did not talk about "engineered" or breeded (bread?) food.

Actually posters have been, but you seem to have some difficult reading what people are saying. And by "engineered" food, in this context, referring to crops that have been around for thousands of years as many of the crops show massive changes from breeding, even long before recorded history.

We talked about chemical free food. And he came with an "dihydrogenmonoxid" pseudo argument.

Unfortunately, despite your claims otherwise, your posts seem to only confirm the point of the dihydrogen monoxide argument. The distinction between chemicals that are added to plants versus those that are not is pretty much useless, and actually gets used to bolster incorrect things or to misdirect (intentionally or not) people from real problems. People should realize there is potential for chemicals to be dangerous to health, regardless of if they were added to the plant or not. To only call added stuff "chemical" demonstrates a shortsightedness that misses how much chemistry is going on in natural, untouched plants, and more importantly, misses the significant impact that can have too.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[Macgrrl]

I have this argument with people frequently about why I rarely wear cosmetics[1] and they keep telling me I should try 'brand X' because 'it's all natural'. Just because it's natural doesn't make it safe, there are plenty of plants for example which are poisonous either to consume or are contact irritants.

[1] The main reason I rarely wear cosmetics is they frequently produce mild allergic reactions. the more frequently I wear them, the worse the reaction is. Even 'hypoallergenic all natural 100% botanical' products have resulted in sun-burn like chemical burns and minor swelling.

Re:This is against current food movements.

[blackpaw]

Fair enough

The Commandement des Opérations Spéciale

[Intrepid imaginaut]

...has already dispatched a team.

No More Food Waste? My Ass.

[CanHasDIY]

Food Oil Cartridge is too low to allow non-oil based printing. You must replace ALL cartridges to continue printing.

The printer has detected a refilled cartridge in it's carrier; system lock-out until brand new cartridge is inserted.

Re:No More Food Waste? My Ass.

[Anonymous Coward]

PC LOAD LETTER

Re:No More Food Waste? My Ass.

[Anonymous Coward]

Please note that we encourage you not to refill cartridges for your own personal health and safety. Refilled cartridges may not be clean and thus subject your food to contamination as per this report from Weyland-Yutani (*).

(*) - While the report is sponsored by P&G we are in no way related to Weyland-Yutani corporation.

Re:No More Food Waste? My Ass.

[Anonymous Coward]

that's PC LOAD LETTUCE you insensitive clod!!!

Re:No More Food Waste? My Ass.

[Anonymous Coward]

system lock-out until brand new $5000.00 cartridge is inserted. FTFY

Re:No More Food Waste? My Ass.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re:No More Food Waste? My Ass.

OP provides his own solution. I think.

Re:No More Food Waste? My Ass.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

In my case, it would be PC LOAD LARD...

Need to go on a diet...

Re:No More Food Waste? My Ass.

[Anonymous Coward]

someone will copyright it, then nobody else can do it for about 100 years. Situation solved.

Re:No More Food Waste? My Ass.

[50000BTU_barbecue]

Man, even in the future people can't tell it's from its.

Re:No More Food Waste? My Ass.

[XxtraLarGe]

someone will copyright it, then nobody else can do it for about 100 years. Situation solved.

Since it's a tech, it can't be copyrighted, only patented. However, I think anyone who receives taxpayer money to develop a technology should lose any patent rights to the technology. It's paid for by the public, it should be open to the public.

Re:No More Food Waste? My Ass.

[sociocapitalist]

Food Oil Cartridge is too low to allow non-oil based printing. You must replace ALL cartridges to continue printing.

The printer has detected a refilled cartridge in it's carrier; system lock-out until brand new cartridge is inserted.

You just have to wait for the 3D printed 3D printers that have been jailbroken to take any cartridge

Rendezvous with Rama

[janek78]

I'm not a Star Trek fan but this always reminds me of A. C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. It is exciting to live in the future.

Re:Rendezvous with Rama

[oPless]

Surely you mean his little known novella Rendezvous with Ramen?

Re:Rendezvous with Rama

[Quirkz]

His little known nutella "Ratatouille with Reza"?

Re:Rendezvous with Rama

[Ceriel Nosforit]

That is the book which taught me English! I got it for Christmas with a PC gameand thought I'd get some clues to the puzzles by reading it. Didn't, but it's still some of the best Sci-Fi I've ever read.

I sat in my bed at night with an English dictionary, captivated and unable to sleep because I had to know what happened next. =D

Nachos are the perfect printable food

[Spy Handler]

delicious and easy to print

Astronauts will be eating a lot of nachos on Mars.

You heard it here first.

Re:Nachos are the perfect printable food

[boristdog]

Nachos?

Depends on how much weed they can grow on Mars, I guess.

Come to think of it, a pop-tart is pretty ripe for printing like this as well.

Re:Nachos are the perfect printable food

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

Pop Tarts make for an effective source of heat, too. Win-win.

Re: Nachos are the perfect printable food

[Deekin_Scalesinger]

Can't we just print some weed along with the nachos and pop tarts?

Re:Nachos are the perfect printable food

[Zaatxe]

Astronauts will be eating a lot of nachos on Mars.

Doesn't Mars have enough greenhouse gas in its atmosphere?

12 billion people will use this daily?

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume then that the world's population will be about 15 billion.

Preppers

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like a good product for the Apocalypse preppers. For the rest of us, not so much.

Re:Preppers

[oPless]

Apocalypse peppers?

Sounds interesting ... what's the Scoville value of them? 20 million? 40?

H2G2G

[dabadab]

OK, so who will be the first to post the phrase "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea"?

Oh, it was me.

Re:H2G2G

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Taste Tester: It tastes...familiar.
Linda: Like beef?
Taste Tester: No...
Ted: Or chicken? We'll take chicken.
Taste Tester: No, it tastes like...despair?

Re:H2G2G

[CanHasDIY]

+5 Internets for quoting the 2nd best too-short-lived TV show, right after Firefly.

Re:H2G2G

[oPless]

Is it possible it just needs salt?

Re:H2G2G

[Anonymous Coward]

What about Anna Zimmerman? She knows how to make one, or at least her sisters will.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_to_the_Infinite_Power

From my cold, dead hands...

[fl!ptop]

He sees a day when every kitchen has a 3-D printer, and the earth's 12 billion people feed themselves customized, nutritionally-appropriate meals synthesized one layer at a time, from cartridges of powder and oils they buy at the corner grocery store

No flipping way. You'll have to pry my garden from my cold dead hands before I'm eating that shit.

Re:From my cold, dead hands...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your terms are acceptable to us. Address please?

starving kids in africa and cambodia...

[Sebastopol]

...don't care about palatable! i've seen children in cambodia eat bread crusts that are moldy, dirty, and soggy. quite sad, especially when 5U$D can buy enough bags of food to feed 30 kids for a day.

Re:starving kids in africa and cambodia...

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe instead of sending food we should send birth control

wait that would actually solve the problem which nobody really wants to do as long as there is money to be made in prolonging it

Re:starving kids in africa and cambodia...

[oic0]

if $5 could feed ME for a month I might actually have some money to donate :P

Re:starving kids in africa and cambodia...

[Anonymous Coward]

And, of course, the real problem with most hunger in Africa has more to do with poor governance than the world food supply.

Re:starving kids in africa and cambodia...

[Cosgrach]

FINALLY!!!! Someone gets it.

Re:starving kids in africa and cambodia...

[Anonymous Coward]

Quit lying to yourself motherfucker. Rice, beans, bread, that's food.

Doritos, McDonald's, Starbucks, that's not food.

Re:starving kids in africa and cambodia...

[Anonymous Coward]

And the local religious nuts are convincing people that birth control causes AIDS.

Re:starving kids in africa and cambodia...

[Anonymous Coward]

That doesn't actually work. People will tend to have enough children to ensure at least one survives with reasonable probability. Mistakes may happen more often without effective birth control, but the real problem is the death rate. Counterintuitively, lowering the death rate is the best way to reduce population.

Re:starving kids in africa and cambodia...

[Anonymous Coward]

And for $5 you have the choice of rice, beans, or bread, but you don't get any vegetables or meat to go with that.

Re:starving kids in africa and cambodia...

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Yes, they could shove the condoms down the dictator's throat by the fistful until they get democracy and an equitable share of the food.

In fact I would pay good money to watch that.

Re:starving kids in africa and cambodia...

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends on each other, birth control will happen once less children die, due to for example a bad diet.
We don't force condoms onto people in western countries either, kids simply survive and most of us are happy with 1 kid if not less.

Birth control is not the only thing, this isn't a situation where you do X instead of Y and all is fine. They need food and birth control. Simply put, they need a better standard of life.

Re:starving kids in africa and cambodia...

[Anonymous Coward]

Using typical prices in the US, $5 would get you about 10 lb of flour, or 7 lb of rice. That corresponds to about 16000 and 12000 calories respectively. For a reasonably active lifestyle, that would get you about a week's worth of food (ignoring a crap ton of other nutritional needs and cravings). Mixing in some oils and beans would increase the price for the same amount of calories. You might be able to stretch that out to two weeks worth of food by getting deals slightly better than what I've seen at bulk suppliers. I'm not familiar enough to know how much cheaper some wholesale deal straight from the mill or farm would go.

I've been able to eat for about $50/month before, but it was buying just raw grains and veggies, and had a bit of help from friends getting stuff cheap from farmers directly. It depends a lot on where you live in the US too, and it certainly took a lot of time. There are options that save time and give a lot more variety of food, without resorting to fast or junk food, but they do cost a little bit more.

Re:starving kids in africa and cambodia...

[theskipper]

Interestingly, it turns out that the AC's comment is not a troll. As a matter of fact, some googling turned up pop.org (Population Research Institute). It has non-profit status and clearly a front for some Christian organization given their strong pro-life emphasis in the mission statement. To the point, they published an article called "The Pill's Deadly Affair with HIV/AIDS". http://www.pop.org/content/the-pills-deadly-affair-with-hivaids-1199

One paragraph that stood out:

"Likewise, Thailand, praised for a contraceptive prevalence of 79.2% in 2000 and upwards of 70% today, is a land where, “More than one-in-100 adults in this country of 65 million people is infected with HIV.”7 Among Thai women, “Oral contraception is the most popular method.”8, 9

On the other hand, Japan's HIV rate is, at 0.01%, one of the lowest in the world.10 In this context, it is important to note that the birth control pill was illegal in Japan until 1999, and even today only 1% of Japanese women use oral contraception. Similarly, the predominantly Catholic Philippines, with a longstanding popular resistance to contraception, boasts an HIV “prevalence rate of only 0.02%."

The paper is obviously extremely flawed as they don't separate their independent variables at all, thereby picking only the data points that bolsters their "research". For example, for Thai women oral contraceptives are the most common, without saying what the overall usage rate is. If the rate of contraceptive usage is very low overall, the rate of HIV infections will most likely be high whether oral contraceptives are preferred or not. And stating that the Phillipinos are resistant to contraception without stating what the rate of condom usage is. Same with the statement about Japan.

In any case, the point is that there are indeed "religious nuts convincing people that birth control causes AIDS" as the AC stated.

Re:starving kids in africa and cambodia...

[Anonymous Coward]

Reasonably, a month for 5 bucks is pushing it, But it could sustain you for 3 or 4 days or so. Since you're feeling in a generous mood, https://livebelowtheline.com/me/kleinebre/ Thanks in advance!

Re:starving kids in africa and cambodia...

[Joey Vegetables]

Birth control does not directly cause STDs. However, non-monogamous lifestyles do cause STDs, and birth control, by encouraging those types of lifestyles, does increase the number of STDs over time. I'm not sure why one must be a "religious nut" to see that.

PRINTER ON FIRE

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously! Your printer is on FIRE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Who is this for?

[WillgasM]

Other than astronauts and zombie bunkers, I don't see the appeal. We already pack strange synthetic food into cans that have more than enough shelf life for most occasions. I'd be willing to bet I'd prefer the taste and texture of said canned goods to whatever playdough this thing prints out. The only food that occasionally gets wasted around my house is fresh fruits, vegetables, and meat; none of which would really be replaced by this technology. If you find a way to print something more palatable that what I can already get from a can, then let me know.

Re:Who is this for?

[DrVomact]

Other than astronauts and zombie bunkers, I don't see the appeal. ...

I'm afraid the zombie bunker market is non-viable. Why buy an expensive food printer and cartridges when you can buy my recently published 101 Ways to Cook a Zombie for $90 at any reputable book store? Trust me, it's a bargain!

Re:Who is this for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually many of us are fans of homogenous glop like foods. It makes us feel like we live in space.

Re:Who is this for?

[mrbester]

If you close your eyes, it almost feels like you're eating runny eggs.

Re:Who is this for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wake up Neo. The Matrix has you.

https://www.google.com/search?q=wakeupneo.jpg

Living in the future

[bobdehnhardt]

I already have something like this. I input basic food components (including powders and oil, as needed) in a ordered fashion (sometimes layer by layer), and after a short time, I extract a customized, nutritionally-appropriate meal.

It's called an "oven".

Done right, a nutritional plus.

[couchslug]

It's incredibly difficult and time-consuming to eat well.

If there is an efficient way to get ALL the nutrients required in a safe and economic way, that's a great idea for times when cooking for "fun" is too much hassle.

If I could be satiated and well-fed with a mouse-click that would give me more time to enjoy other things in life, and be better for my health too.

Re:Done right, a nutritional plus.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's incredibly difficult and time-consuming to eat well.

No, it's not. That's just a lazy cop-out used to justify a hopeless addition to junk food. Unless you live in an extremely cold and/or remote area, difficulty of eating healthy is pure BS. I think a good part of the problem is that most people don't like or don't recognize healthy, tasty, cheap food.

Re:Done right, a nutritional plus.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called a "wife". I know the word is foreign around here....

Re:Done right, a nutritional plus.

[Smivs]

It's incredibly difficult and time-consuming to eat well.

No it's not!

Re:Done right, a nutritional plus.

[cusco]

No. Not just 'no', but 'Are you flipping crazy?' no.

Brown rice, beans (any kind you like, or multiple cooked together), dice a tomato and a chili into it. Microwave to warm. Chop some cheese and green onions, mix it in, microwave some more until hot. Eat with chips or tortillas. Less than five minutes, and I can do it so stoned that I can hardly focus on changing the CD player.

Re:Done right, a nutritional plus.

[lgw]

So where can I buy pre-prepared heat-and-eat healthy meals? Most "TV dinners" are so loaded with sugar that I can't touch them, and spending the time to develop ancient and esoteric skills like "blacksmithing" or "cooking" aren't high up my list of hobbies this year.

Re:Done right, a nutritional plus.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget to soak the beans for a while, or to take the time to clean them if they are fresh. It is not like healthy beans just come out of a can... and a rice based dish has so many calories...

Re:Done right, a nutritional plus.

[aXis100]

Seriously?

An hour in the supermarket once a week, and half an hour every night to cook is somehow "incredibly difficult and time consuming"? You probably spend more time on facebook.

Even better, if you learn to love cooking, it will become one of those "enjoy other things in life". Cooking can be immediately gratifying, as well as eating better you'll be happier and will impress others.

Re:Done right, a nutritional plus.

[Anonymous Coward]

and half an hour every night to cook is somehow "incredibly difficult and time consuming"

Actually, as someone who loves to cook and on some days will spend a couple hours trying to perfect something new or make large dinners, yes, some nights half an hour is a lot relatively difficult and time consuming. If I know ahead of time I'll be having one of those nights, I can make sure there are left overs, and also try to have a few extra dinners in the freezer. But I have other hobbies besides cooking, and occasionally also have long days at work, sometimes leaving half an hour total to eat because not every activity's timing and scheduling is mutable as time spent on facebook (although I don't think I spend that much time on there in a week...). Not to mention getting home after a long day really kills motivation to cook, even for someone who likes cooking. So yes, depending on context, cooking even for half an hour can be a lot of time (although there is a lot you can do in 15 minutes with practice).

Re:Done right, a nutritional plus.

[WCLPeter]

An hour in the supermarket once a week, and half an hour every night to cook is somehow "incredibly difficult and time consuming"?

You must not be eating healthy. And, like most people, you're forgetting to add the prep and cleaning time. Lets try this again, shall we?

• Fresh meats and veggies have short shelf lives, even when stored in the fridge, as there isn't much in the way of preservatives since you're eating fresh. Because you're going fresh you can only keep a few days stored at a time. You're going to spend about an hour, every other day, walking around the grocery store and waiting in the damn checkout lines to buy what you need for dinner.
• When you get home you're going to spend about 30 minutes, minimum, to prep all that stuff - those books, magazines, and TV shows which tell you that you can do a full meal in 30 minutes are lying, that's often the cooking time after you've spent at least 40 minutes prepping; its not a coincidence that most TV cooking shows have the ingredients prepared in those nice little glass bowls, or the food often cooked in advance - you'd spend most of the hour long show watching the chef cutting and prepping before any of the actual cooking took place.
• After prepping, depending on the meal being cooked, you're looking at another minimum of 30 minutes to cook it all.
• After cooking, unless you're a pig, it'll probably take you at least 15-30 minutes to eat it.
• After eating you've now got a 30-60 minute adventure in the kitchen cleaning up the mess you just made.
• If you like variety in any way shape or form you're likely going to want to eat something different for lunch than yesterday's leftovers - double all the time above if you're also making lunch.
• Did I mention how expensive it is to eat healthy? It wasn't at all uncommon to spend upward of ten to fifteen bucks a meal!

When you add it all up, cooking fresh takes a minimum of 2 hours, every day, prepping, cooking, and cleaning up after yourself. 4 hours if you decide to make a lunch that isn't yesterday's leftovers. Throw an extra hour in for grocery shopping every other day and you're up to three to five hours, daily. And before you go all "bullshit" on me, or try to insinuate that I'm making this up, I USED TO DO THIS! I've wasted hours of my life cooking, prepping, cleaning.

We only get 24 hours in a day. I sleep for 8 of them, work for 8 of them, spend two of them travelling back and forth work, and I used to spend 4 hours - EVERY DAY - eating, cooking, cleaning, prepping, going grocery shopping. I used to have a grand total of 2 whole hours of free time, every day. It was stupid, and a complete waste of my time. I sat down one day and figured it out and by increasing my food budget by about 20% - 30%, I could go out to eat for both lunch and dinner every day for about 30 to 40 minutes each and it wasn't all that hard finding healthy choices either. Now I pay the restaurant / cafeteria at work to cook, prep, and clean and I get back that 4 hours - I'd call that a fair trade.

Re:Done right, a nutritional plus.

[Anonymous Coward]

While I normally am on the side of "cooking healthily can sometimes be too much effort," this post goes way too far. If your veggies are only lasting a couple days, you are either getting screwed at the store or are doing a bad job of buy veggies. There are very few veggies or fruit I can think of that will last less than a week, and at worst you sometimes just have to use it differently. And there are other veggies that will last quite a long time, at least a couple weeks, without any preservatives, etc. I only shop once a week at the grocery store, and once a month at a Costco & farmer's market, yet the bulk of my meals are veggies (and I can't stand frozen or canned veggies).

And if the "30 minute" meals you are using don't count prep time, then you just need a different source. There are a ton of healthy meals out there that take 30 minutes total to make, including prep work. It takes me less than 5 minutes to prep veggies for 2-4 people, and then either a couple minutes for steaming, or at worst 10-15 minutes for broiling. I have a suite of meat entrées, that with practice, are actually possible to make in 15 minutes, with a few gaps for doing the veggie prep in some cases. So 30 minutes is very doable.

And I thought I lived in an expensive area to buy food on the east coast of the US, as many friends at other places told me I was spending a lot more than them on similar food. And yet, I usually went for $10/day/person... after I finished graduate school where I was going for $5/day/person and had even less free time.

And I'm not sure how the time spent eating counts against it, as if other options would make that much of a difference short of just drinking a liquid diet. I also don't know why it would take more than ten minutes to clean 1-2 pans, a knife, and a cutting board (especially if you take a few seconds to throw water in them real quick before sitting down to eat).

And before you go all "bullshit" on me, or try to insinuate that I'm making this up, I USED TO DO THIS! I've wasted hours of my life cooking, prepping, cleaning.

Funny thing about that... you claim people can't do better, therefore no one can call bullshit. Except, I have and continue to do what you say is not possible. Maybe you are exaggerating, or maybe not and you are just really bad at cooking or using a kitchen. Saying you need a minimum 2 hours every day is just flat out false, as there are days I have an hour total all day to make and eat all my meals.

Now there are reasons that eating healthily can be difficult, but it comes down to mainly motivation and the need for at least some basic skills. Except in some cases where people have some serious learning issues, the latter comes back to just motivation anyway. I do think people are too easy to discount the motivation and energy it takes to cook things, even if the time investment is minimal, as there are some days where meal time seems to be more about resting than eating. But if you are that bad at food prep and cooking, don't assume everyone else is, or try to encourage people to think that is just how things are when most of them are quite capable of doing better.

Re:Done right, a nutritional plus.

[shikaisi]

It's incredibly difficult and time-consuming to eat well.

No it's not. See Jamie's 15-minute Meals http://www.jamieoliver.com/books-and-media/#revolution_of_food_bg

Re:Done right, a nutritional plus.

[AthanasiusKircher]

So where can I buy pre-prepared heat-and-eat healthy meals?

Oh, I don't know -- some local hippy supermarket that will charge you a ridiculous amount of money? Yes, you can probably buy healthy heat-and-eat meals, but it will cost you.

But why would you do that when you can have a lot more choice if you take minimal effort to do it yourself? In about the same amount of time it will take you to use the microwave or toaster oven to heat up your prepared dinner, you could probably make something yourself.

Most "TV dinners" are so loaded with sugar that I can't touch them,

If you're just looking for "better than TV dinners," that's pretty easy.

and spending the time to develop ancient and esoteric skills like "blacksmithing" or "cooking" aren't high up my list of hobbies this year.

You just need to buy some separate ingredients, and maybe look for one of those easy cookbooks with a title like "Easy one-dish meals" or something. With a couple cans and some frozen stuff, you can probably cut prep time down to a few minutes per meal. It's hardly rocket science to throw a few ingredients into a pot, stir, and heat.

Now, is this the best option? Of course not. But I'm sure with just a little experimentation and a decent cookbook, you'll pretty quickly figure out a dozen or more easy dishes you can throw together without even thinking. And by building your own dish from a few separate ingredients, you have a lot more control over your food already than with a packaged frozen TV dinner -- and you can get rid of the excess sugar and other bad stuff, not to mention choosing ingredients you like and making the dish taste better for you.

Heck, if you start doing this, you might even realize that it's pretty darn easy to cook at a basic level. You might even start buying fresh ingredients, figure out how to chop vegetables almost as fast as you could open a can or heat the bag from the freezer, etc. And then you'll be eating stuff that's a LOT more healthy than the frozen dinners.

But if you just throw up your hands and say, "It's too hard!", well, I don't know what to say. Your body is literally made out of what you eat. Making some minimal investment of 10 minutes per day or whatever in food preparation can probably have a much greater impact on your general quality of life than most things you could do. You don't have to take up cooking as a "hobby" and spend your weekend designing elaborate five-course dinners -- but I'd like to think that some people might have a vague utilitarian interest in putting better stuff into their bodies... enough to invest a few minutes per day.

Re:Done right, a nutritional plus.

[lgw]

Yeah, 10 minutes of preparations, 30 minutes of heating, and 10 minutes of cleanup is totally the same as 2 minutes in the microwave. And when cooking for one, it's hard to make appropriate portions from fresh ingredients without a lot of waste. Needing 1/3rd of a tomato for something is just annoying (not that I should have even that much sugar in a meal).

Your body is literally made out of what you eat.

Only after what you eat had been soaked in a pit of acid, then specific parts of the result selected by enzymes for later use. It's amazing the crazy stuff people convince themselves of regarding "processed" food.

Re:Done right, a nutritional plus.

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe he was saying 10 minutes -total-, not 10 minutes of prep. I cook meals from scratch every day and 10 minutes of prep, 30 minutes of heating, and 10 minutes of cleanup is definitely way more time than I normally spend. I've also never had an issue with making stuff from fresh ingredients without waste, even when cooking only for myself. I also know people who basically make all of their food for the week on Sunday, freeze, and just heat throughout the week. It's more time in one chunk but might solve the problem of wasted ingredient parts. You could probably even do more than a week at once depending on what kinds of things you're making.

Re:Done right, a nutritional plus.

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, I eat primarily fresh vegetables. I have no problem shopping once a week and having my veggies last all week. Additionally, I have no problems cooking a meal from start to finish, including chopping and other prep, in less than 30 minutes. Yes most tv chefs have food pre-prepped but Rachel Ray's show shows her getting everything from the fridge, chopping, and cooking in less than 30 minutes. I don't really like her or the stuff she cooks but she does get a meal done from start to finish in 30 minutes. I don't time how long it takes me to do dishes but 30-60 minutes is ridiculous. I'd guess I spend maybe 10 minutes max. I spend about the same amount of time prepping and cooking breakfast and lunch(I do both at the same time). So, that's less than 1 hour a day cooking and maybe 20 minutes cleaning(and I doubt it's even that much). As to the cost of food, again most of my groceries are fresh vegetables, I spend less than $100 per week for two people. That's less than $3 per meal per person. You can definitely eat healthy food for way under $10-$15 per meal and with spending less than an hour per day. With simpler breakfasts and lunches, I could probably cut down my morning food prep in half...but I prefer to eat somewhat more complicated lunches.

Re:Done right, a nutritional plus.

[Macgrrl]

Here's a 'quick' recipe. Grab a steak, drop it in a hot non-stick pan (I use Swiss Diamond or Scanpan, no oil needed), sprinkle with some dried garlic. Turn after a few minutes, squeeze on some lemon juice, cook for another few minutes, turn off heat and cover pan. Put 2 cups of mixed frozen vegetables in the microwave for 5 minutes. Serve steak and veges to eat, pouring meat juices over veges.

The number of minutes it takes to cook the steak depends on how well done you want it and how thick the cut. To clean the pan wipe it under hot water.

Sure there's more dishes than a TV dinner tray from freezer to bin, but it's healthier and certainly tastier.

Re:Done right, a nutritional plus.

[Macgrrl]

It seriously takes you 30-60 minutes to clean up after cooking? What the hell are you doing - spreading it all over the walls and ceiling?

It takes me about 15 minutes to do the dishes from a 3 course meal for 4 (though usually it's 1 course for 2 people) - including wiping down the counters and cooktop as I finish. For more complicated meals, I often do dishes while the food is cooking (e.g. if I've made lasagne from scratch, or something else that's made in stages), so that the overall prep/cleanup time is shorter. But I wouldn't usually do that type of cooking mid week on a work night.

Generally lunch is sandwiches, I buy the ingredients twice a week when shopping for other meals. I make the sandwiches up before doing the dishes at night and they take about 10 minutes to do for myself and my husband.

The way you become efficient at something is through practice. If you have a number of easy recipes in your repertoire, you can either knock them out really fast, or know which ones you can let sit and cook for a bit while you go do something else, like making a casserole and kicking back watching TV, reading or whatever while it cooks.

Right.

[slapyslapslap]

Because today's food made from powder sucks because of the method of reconstitution, and not the fact that it was made into a fucking powder in the first place.

The body is not built for processed foods

[mtippett]

Although it can be nutritionally appropriate, it may still not be good for the body. I am not a biologist, but I don't believe that the body is built for finely processed food. I am assuming that there is some research correlating highly processed/refined foods and the some of the common ailments in the western world.

A great example I have seen showing processed vs non-processed foods is to simply put the food in a bowl of water. A lot of processed food will within a matter of minutes puff up to a multiple of their size, and when stirred will simply break up into a liquid solution. Natural (unprocessed, even minimally processed) foods will generally stay together for a lot longer.

Give it a couple of centuries, and we'll see how the human gut and digestive system evolve. Oh wait, we'll have medical systems to prevent natural selection, so we're going to be co-dependently evolving with our technology.

Re:The body is not built for processed foods

[angel'o'sphere]

You are completely right, food like this would likely not contain any fibres. So digesting and moving it through your guts will be difficult, especially if your diet is based heavy on it.

What is wrong witha fresh salad? And how would you print that in such a machine?

Re:The body is not built for processed foods

[Ken_g6]

You are completely right, food like this would likely not contain any fibres.

Fiber...in a powder. I wonder what it will take to invent that? Maybe someday they can even make it flavorless and colorless!

Re:The body is not built for processed foods

[Anonymous Coward]

Eat grass and this. Good to go.

Re:The body is not built for processed foods

[Anonymous Coward]

You realize Metamucil comes as a powder right

Re:The body is not built for processed foods

[tragedy]

A great example I have seen showing processed vs non-processed foods is to simply put the food in a bowl of water. A lot of processed food will within a matter of minutes puff up to a multiple of their size, and when stirred will simply break up into a liquid solution. Natural (unprocessed, even minimally processed) foods will generally stay together for a lot longer.

That's not exactly a surprising observation. Same thing is true of most particleboard vs. unprocessed wood as well. You've failed to demonstrate at all why this would be a problem. Try your test on some chicken flesh compared to an identical piece of chicken flesh that's been chewed, swallowed, then chemically processed by enzymes and stomach acids in a human stomach. After you've tried that test, you may understand why your argument is easily dismissed by most people when you put it that way.

That said, there are reasons more heavily processed foods may be worse for you than unprocessed. One of those reasons is that the processed foods often simply come from poorer base materials than the unprocessed foods, which is why they needed to be processed in the first place. If the unprocessed food is a nice cut of chicken breast and the processed food is ground up chicken cartilage with a little bone and other otherwise less than usable bits of the chicken after everything is else is stripped off, then the processed food typically won't be as good. That's not universally true though. The hydroxyl-apatite in ground bone can actually be an ideal source of bio-available calcium, for example, and various organ meats which people typically shun in low-processed form are full of great nutrition. The majority of what goes into the processed chicken patty, however, is crap. Figuratively and also, to some degree, literally. Processes get developed to extract the maximum nutrition from food. This should be a good thing in a hungry world. Unfortunately, it's a hungry world with marketing departments and a heavy profit motive.

Processing of food isn't inherently evil. People have been processing food to extract more nutrition from it for millennia. Grinding bones to make your bread (bone cakes are full of calcium and nutritious bone marrow) is just one example. Another set of great examples are demonstrated by Pellagra and Kwashiorkor which are two medical conditions. You may not have heard of Pellagra, but just think of a typical portrayal of leprosy and you won't go far wrong. Kwashiorkor you have probably seen in ads for hunger-relief charities: swollen ankles, distended belly, hair loss, loss of teeth, dermatitis. These conditions are specialized forms of malnutrition that can occur in individuals who may actually be getting enough food to survive (although they may frequently be generally malnourished as well), but are suffering from niacin or protein deficiencies. They both tend to show up among people who live essentially exclusively on corn (poor Italian peasants in the case of Pellagra, and mostly African children living on food aid for Kwashiorkor). The all-corn diet might be providing enough calories, but is deficient in some vital nutrients. As it turns out, South American natives living on the same diet weren't suffering from these same issues. The reason comes down to food processing. Traditional preparation of corn involves nixtamalizing it, which basically means boiling it in a lime (the mineral, not the fruit) solution. The resulting processed food, called nixtamal is more nutritious (technically, it has fewer calories, but it provides a wider variety of nutrients) and people using it as a staple food are less likely to develop extreme nutritional disorders.

Going back to the downsides of processing food, there's the issue of preservation. Some processing, of course, preserves much of the nutritive value of the food for a very long time. Examples of this are salting, dehydrating and pickling. The processing does, however, often destroy some of the nutrients in the food as well and it typically involves p

Re:The body is not built for processed foods

[angel'o'sphere]

Hm, you seem to misunderstand how the guts work?

A powder is by definition not a fibre.

If it was once a fibre it is grinded down to a powder now, or it was not called a powder.

Think of a fibre literally as of gras in your guts. You need that for a healthy digestive system.

Re:The body is not built for processed foods

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for writing that up, as that is usually more words than I would say about it, at least on Slashdot. You give the example of grinding up bones for some traditional recipes, but the contrasting example I always think of is making stock. Many of the people complaining about processed meat products make complaints, "But it is full of bone and cartilage, why would you use that in food?," some of which I know would use the same material for making soup stock. At least if you pressure them about it, some will then complain about the preservatives used instead, for which there are some much more valid issues. But for even many people who know of legitimate complaints, the first thing they go to is not something specific, but instead to things based on inconsistent disgust reactions and "simple rules." It is particularly sad when they use such inconsistent disgust reaction to try to convince others (especially kids) something is bad, but then turn around and tell people they should try new things, and ignore their disgust reaction to things they think are good.

Re:The body is not built for processed foods

[dbIII]

food like this would likely not contain any fibres

Unless a minute of thought is put in :)
Even the quick and nasty ring pull tin meals in the supermarket near me say things like "contains two serves of vegetables" with the chilli beef, chicken stew or whatever. If such things are not common over in the USA they probably will be soon. Fibre is going to be high on the list in the early stages now since people don't expect to live off twinkies anymore.

Considering even viable nerve cells are being printed that fresh salad may happen - even if it has to be built out of shredded and dried not so fresh salad.

Either way I'm far more interested in the research work that's bringing the characteristics of some of the old tomato varieties into the current varieties that were bred for yield and shelf life instead of taste. It's got to the point that tinned tomato and dried tomato from varieties that are too fragile to ship taste better than fresh ones.

Re:The body is not built for processed foods

[angel'o'sphere]

Yeah, tomatoes.
That is a thing. I did not buy tomatoes since 0 years, who the fuck are the idiot customers that do? Tomatoes in our days taste like (no shit is overrated) .. like nothing. Well, indeed hey have a foul undescribable side taste.
In ten years I will start the hunt for old tomato plants, fortunately there is a huge movement in the USA to preserve plants and seeds. I hope we still can get them then and I make a garden of tomatoes only :D

Re:The body is not built for processed foods

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to have no idea what dietary fiber is. It doesn't physically large structures like fiber you would picture from the textile industry, it instead has more to do with how it affects the consistency of digested food, especially with how it absorbs or doesn't absorb water. The kind that absorbs water thickens stuff and produces the exact results you describe of making it easier for stuff to be pushed through. Yes, there are powdered forms of dietary fiber, and it does what is needed for a healthy digestive system.

Re:The body is not built for processed foods

[dbIII]

You can still get a lot of the old varieties as seed - taste good but useless commercially due to short shelf life and too soft to ship. I'm trying out some "Rouge de Marmande".
Harry Klee at the University of Florida is working on the problem:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/putting-the-flavour-back-into-tomatoes/4576086

I like cooking

[EMG at MU]

This is probably really cool for a lot of the worlds people that may not have access to the technology required to preserve food.

But I like cooking. Its one of the last things that I do that is kind of not actively involved with technology. Of course technology is involved in every process of growing/producing food but theres something cool about taking a bunch of raw ingredients and using basic tools (cast iron, fire) to create delicious food. I don't want that to go away.

Re:I like cooking

[Anonymous Coward]

But they'll have access to tissue reactors?

Don't worry, you'll still be cooking, now and in ten years. The ridiculous over hyping of 3D printing guarantees it. I don't know why we are focusing on the "3D printing" here, it's the miraculous nature of the oils and powders here that are the real story... And the 48 hour print times... And the fact that you still need heat to cook or bake things.

This is so delusional it's not funny.

Taste is for girls

[vikingpower]

This is the stuff the future is made off. Only thing still missing: flying cars. WTG !!

Re:Taste is for girls

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you need them to land safely?

We don't know enough

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't yet know enough about "food" to make this a reality. We discovered that food was made up of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. OK, settled. Um -- then we discovered trace elements/minerals, that are essential to health. OK, settled. Then we discovered (I may have this somewhat out of order) vitamins/micronutrients. Now we have phytonutrients. Next we'll have ...

Bottom line: "food" is chemically extremely complex. I don't believe we begin to know enough to make 3D printing a reality. Well, OK, we probably know enough to make it a reality. But not a healthy reality.

Personally...

[Applekid]

I'd rather have food pills that the future promised 60 years ago.

Re:Personally...

[CanHasDIY]

I'd rather have food pills that the future promised 60 years ago.

So, skip the printer and ingest the cartridges directly.

Re:Personally...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.survivaltabs.com/

Soylent raises $100k in 2 hours

[Anonymous Coward]

In related news, the Soylent Kickstarter campaign today raised over $100k in under 2 hours.

https://campaign.soylent.me/soylent-free-your-body

Oh good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a paste that's squeezed through a tube with a nozzle. I better tell my neighborhood pastry chef he's using a 3 D printer. Can we PLEASE stop this overhyping of 3D printing? It's gotten to the point that "3D printing" is a meaningless phrase!

Here's another food 3D printer!

Wow!

Oscar Meyer

[bugs2squash]

I'm not sure how Turkey bacon is made today, but it seems like it might be a 2D printing process.

Re:Oscar Meyer

[cusco]

I think it's excreted directly from the sphincter of domesticated demons. Stuff is nothing but NASTY.

Re:Oscar Meyer

[Anonymous Coward]

Turkey bacon is easy to make crispy, has quite a bit fewer calories than normal bacon, and even the good kinds are cheaper than cheap bacon that won't taste good. Finding good, lean, normal bacon not filled with a bunch of preservatives is enough of a pain and gets quite expensive in some areas.

Re:Oscar Meyer

[cusco]

I don't eat bacon because I want it to be lower in calories or cheaper, and while crispy is good it's not necessary. I eat bacon because it want it to TASTE GOOD! Greasy, smokey, fried pork belly. Hell, I eat chicharrones (the real pig meat with skin and bones, not the nasty fried pork rinds the Mexicans call chicharron), do you think I'm worried about calories?

So sugar only lasts 30 years?

[angel'o'sphere]

If food is stored air tight many of it can be stored "for ever".

Sugar, flour, salt, oils (olive oil e.g.) even meat in a can can be stored hundrets of years.

Heck, people dig out mammoth in siberia and eat them, those where "stored" there for 10,000 years.

The fear of rotten food in ur modern days is barely understandable ...

Re:So sugar only lasts 30 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

The fear of rotten food in ur modern days is barely understandable

It depends a lot on your local fauna and what actually makes it go bad though. I've lived places where recipes for old food abounds, and then other places where using some of the same ingredients after they have spoiled will make you quite sick. And it depends on the food. Of course oils, sugar, and salt last a long time, as they are preservatives that very few things can live in when the concentration is high enough. Other foods usually need something done to them to make them last long, and typically that does impact the nutrition and health of the item.

Absolutely disgusting.

[kheldan]

That's what that sounds like. Would I eat that stuff if the choice was that or starve? Yes. But I wouldn't choose it. Talk about the ultimate in processed food!

Finally!

[Cosgrach]

I can print my very own Pink Slime in the comfort of my own home. Yay!

Oh, wait...

hewlett packard?

[Anonymous Coward]

cartridges will be so expensive, its cheaper to buy a new printer!

Complex geometry

[Guano_Jim]

The geometry of food has an effect on how we perceive taste, so it wouldn't shock me if chefs to specialize in molecular gastronomy started experimenting with novel structures once 3d food printers become commonplace.

A thousand quatloos to the first person to design creme bruleé shell with the texture of cotton candy, 3d printed in a popsicle form factor.

Re:Complex geometry

[mrjb]

Finally someone here that seems to grasp the potential. The point is not to simply pop a powder in a 3d printer and squeezing out a paste in an interesting shape. The point is that ultimately permits us to cook "note by note" - a future discussed by Hervé This ("The man who uncooked an egg") in this excellent lecture:

Soylent

[Anonymous Coward]

Why a printer? I've been following this guy http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298 on HN for awhile. He is doing a similar thing but just mixing the chemicals himself with a scale and a blender. I supposed if you want to eat solids then a printer would help.

Food replicators?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean that a Star Trek like food replicator is close at hand? Beam me up Scotty! :-)

CHON food.

[Anonymous Coward]

This most resembles the Heechee Saga, which is a fun read by the way. Carbon Hydrogen Oxygen Nitrogen food synthesized from comet dribbles.

Connoisseurs

[Anonymous Coward]

Real connoisseurs use saffron cartridges to flavor their protein cubes.

pink slime or cheetos?

[Thud457]

Tea, Earl Grey, Hot!

the Nutri-Matic machine provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

Woman!

[Anonymous Coward]

Woman! Git bayack here an' print me a sayandwich!

Construction blocks

[gmuslera]

3D printers turns materials i,e, thermoplastic) into a shape. But you still need the base materials. We are far from CHON food syntetizers. They must have some input, and better to be nutrient complete (and not what they think is nutrient complete, but what our body effectively needs). What it will use? Insects?, Soylent green ?

Anyway, just giving shape to something that you already have don't seem so big breakthrough. Just making a smoothie with them should be pretty similar.

Re:Construction blocks

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but the 3D printing hype must flow! Geeks must honestly believe that they are part of a scientific and engineering breakthrough when they are playing with their fourteenth iteration of a plastic blob vaguely resembling a Star Wars character.

Re:Construction blocks

[Xyrus]

I'll wait for 3-D printable Colon Blow before I buy one. Although I suspect any 3D printable food would be marketable as a respectable clone of Colon Blow.

Maybe, maybe not...

[J Mack Daddy]

This might work and it might not... all I know is the proof will be in the pudding.

Why bother with eating?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously. If one is going to go through the trouble of chemically seperating their food, why not just dump the chemicals directly into the bloodstream? Yes, people will have the feeling they want to eat food, but there are chemicals that stop that feeling. Diet pills are quite similar. As a bonus, if automatic waste extraction is added, that is pretty close to suspended animation for those long trips to Mars.

To get UN funding

[Culture20]

Add insect powder.

Careful about Complaints

[Roger W Moore]

I'd be careful about complaining about the food it prints to the cook. It probably will not be long before someone figures out how to make it print an edible gun.

Re:Careful about Complaints

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing you haven't seen Existenz? Edible guns are already in the movies, I predict we'll see prototypes of them some time in the next 5 years.

Re:Careful about Complaints

[AlphaWolf_HK]

Perhaps with marshmallow inside.

http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/153005/chocolate-suicide

Now I've heard everything!!

[Rhurazz12]

My God, printable food? If our stomach's are fucked up enough as it is, just wait till this shit hits our colon. They've got printable edible photos that you can put on cakes already, and that tastes horrible as it is. Next a sign will say.. BEST CARDBOARD YOU'LL TASTE EVER!!, with foods that are cut from a consumer 3-D printer!

Pre-consumer waste, maybe

[Shag]

If you can eliminate all the waste that occurs before the food is served, that's okay.

But invent something that'll get my toddler to finish her scrambled egg without losing interest, and you've really got something.

Re:Pre-consumer waste, maybe

[iggymanz]

fear not, you can adapt a technique my grandfather used to plump up his poultry (geese, ducks, chickens). he'd jam food into the mouths past the throat, and use his clenched hand on their neck to force the food into their bellies.

Re:Pre-consumer waste, maybe

[mrjb]

It has already been invented. It's called pancakes. Your toddler will still get all the nutrition that the egg has to give. Put some freshly made strawberry sauce/jam on top and nutritional content will be better than that of just scrambled eggs. If you're worried about blood glucose spikes, use xylitol instead of sugar.

yuk, tastes like astronaut!

[Anonymous Coward]

nuf said

Negative

[zdepthcharge]

So much nay saying and negativity. And all of it pointing to straw men. I wonder what the next generation will find despicable.

NO THANK YOU!

[p51d007]

Yeah right! you mean GOVERNMENT APPROVED, nutritionally "appropriate" meals. There will be two sets of "approved" meals. One set for we the little people, and for the "elitist" types, they will still be chowing down on regular food. feed themselves customized, nutritionally-appropriate meals synthesized one layer at a time, from cartridges of powder and oils they buy at the corner grocery store.

Re:Soylent raises $100k in 2 hours

[LukeWebber]

<oblig>Soylent Green is PEOPLE!</oblig>

This is food pill version 2.0...

[Nemosoft Unv.]

...while we even haven't got the 1.0 version (that is, a simple pill that you can pop in your mouth and contains all the necessary nutrients). But it will fail for the same reasons:

• Food is more than just a list of nutrients. It is something most of us enjoy, for its taste, its texture, smell, color, etc. etc.
• It would be very difficult to reproduce the texture of say, a cake, a steak or scrambled eggs. The process by which the food is produced is just as important.
• How are they going to serve warm dishes? If I have to microwave it I might as well pop in a package from the freezer.
• But most importantly: it won't solve the world's hunger because most people that cannot afford food today will most certainly not be able to afford powders and cartridges, produced by commercial companies in rich, Western countries. Besides, where are they going to plug the machine into?

It might solve a problem for NASA; it will not solve the hunger ór the obesity epidemic. No, just give me this

Cool

[houbou]

We live in interesting times.

The Reality: Meatloaf from the Lexx

[Anonymous Coward]

Medium Spicy with a few vegetables and a chocolate desert on the side.

Nutritional Value and Applicability

[Dripdry]

New technology isn't always better technology. Processed foods turned out to be pretty bad. What about printed foods? Just because we pack a bunch of powders into something doesn't make it nutritious, in fact (no reference, sorry) I recall hearing that one needs whole foods to be healthy. We don't know how the body processes all these things, and simply putting them together in something doesn't make it healthy. Granted, printed food is probably better than nothing, but I'll keep my fresh veggies and meat for now, thanks.
Also, the hitch seems to be that we won't waste food. I've heard stats in the U.S. that we waste a ton of food. I certainly don't, does that stat count restaurants? Would this tech end up there?

Interesting

[Osgeld]

Since when does NASA have 125 grand to toss around, all we ever hear about is how they are being strangled by budgets, but apparently have enough to give away an eighth million dollars on a sketchup drawing and melted chocolate.

Which BTW people IS NOT the first of its kind, we have seen chocolate 3d printers as early as 2011
http://www.gizmag.com/3d-chocolate-printer/19121/

I can see it now...

[nighthawk243]

The 3D printer is $30, but a 1lb flour cartridge? $300.

30 years carriges

[manu0601]

They will have to find a trick to make vitamin C not degraded after 30 years.

Reminder: humans cannot live without many micronutriments, and most of them are fragile.

How about...

[denzacar]

...an organic shiv instead?

Bangladesh ?

[Anonymous Coward]

So this the 'answer' to food shortages mandated by the UN in order to further the UN genocide per continent requirements to alleviate 'Global Human Warming.'

Ha ha. Fuck UN. Use the M88 on curse missiles to obliterate the 'Rat Nest' in lower Manhattan.

God Speed to Hell UN.

Space Food Sticks!

[cstacy]

Print these! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPZ8HHRR1A0

People are starving

[holophrastic]

Here's why it won't work. It's really very simple. Currently, today, in many big cities, people are starving. Call them homeless, call them poor; some are even starving to death.

And yet, there is protein available all around them. Insects are phenominal nutrition, and easily found.

It would seem that many people would prefer to starve rather than eat insects.

Where does a cartridge of complex carbohydrates rank on your list? On mine, it's way below carrot; it's below tomato. On my list, it's somewhere down around bean sprouts. To be clear, I don't eat bean sprouts except by accident. Which I guess places it above mushrooms, which I actively seek out and avoid.

Not pizza!

[Jewfro_Macabbi]

It should be: Tea, Earl Grey, hot.

Inkjet model, anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an idea!

I'd sell you the printer for cheap and let you pay through the nose for the cartridges (which would be, for some reason combined cartridges for all seventeen base ingredients: once they run out of one of the ingredients, they are done).

Refilling isn't fair game: the cartridges will contain a chip which decides "I'm empty" -- for your own safety, of course. And reverse-engineering this chip would be a violation of the DMCA.

Oh, wait...

(Darn. Captcha was: "loaded". By now I *know* this thing is sentient)

waffle maker

[Anonymous Coward]

isn't a waffle maker a special case of "food printer"? i don't get it. What's actually new here? extruders in food are centuries old

Ripoff City

[pubwvj]

"He sees a day when every kitchen has a 3-D printer, and the earth's 12 billion people feed themselves customized, nutritionally-appropriate meals synthesized one layer at a time, from cartridges of powder and oils they buy at the corner grocery store."

What he is salivating about is a day when everyone pays him a royalty for every bite they eat.

There are no "corner grocery stores" in most of the world and especially not in the places starving.

We can already, without any electricity or fancy technology, turn sunshine into forages to grow meat. That he'll never beat.

Wait for it!

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll die from hunger, waiting for it to finish printing.

What a sucky website

[Anonymous Coward]

Auto-reloads halfway reading, top-bar that cannot gotten rid of obscuring scrollbar, breaking pgup/pgdn and scrolling other than with the scrollwheel, and deliberately breaking the serving of a bit of textual content and a picture if you get sick of all the "enhancements" and audaciously try to turn off javascript.

So yeah, I stopped reading TFA for excessive site suckyness. No need to link to those bozos again.

solution seeks problem

[gzuckier]

you know, you can already make your own food, out of dirt, water, and sunlight.

This should be....

[P-niiice]

I want the instant meal things they had on bugs bunny where you'd add a drop of water and it would turn into a full turkey dinner with about 8 courses plus dishes and silverware.

Not only will criminals print guns

[Anonymous Coward]

They will eat them to hide the evidence

Print out a 48once coke and have NYPD at you door

[Anonymous Coward]

Print out a 48once coke and have NYPD at you door