TAVERN OF THE SEAS david biggs Far-fetched food printing ideas create a stir
RETIREMENT is a fulltime job but I happened to have a few spare moments on Workers’ Day and decided to spend them trawling the internet for interesting snippets of useful news.
One of my favourite sites is a slightly eccentric blog called foodwizard@getrevue.co and it lists what the blogger, an Irish chef called Brian, refers to as his “culinary musings”.
There’s always something slightly offbeat and intriguing to be found there and I wasn’t disappointed this time.
We have probably all heard of 3D printing by now. I have no idea how it works, but apparently you feed in a computer-generated design containing all the necessary details and press “print” and the machine builds up an exact replica of the item, layer by layer.
I believe they’ve already printed a whole motor car. What next?
According to the foodwizard blog some technically-minded chefs are experimenting with edible 3D printouts.
As far as I can make out, you break down foods into their basic components – carbohydrates, vitamins, fibres, proteins and so on, then convert them into a sort of generic food compound and feed it into the printer to print out whatever shape and texture you need.
It’s obviously in its early stages, and the boffins are experimenting with basics like texture and porosity, but think of the implication when they finally get it right!
Once you break down a pig or a chicken into its basic components you can use it to print any shape and texture of food you want.
Think of that. You march a cow into one end of your factory, atomise it and press the “print” button and produce 200 plump chickens. You might even use the components of a chicken to print out eggs. (That would end the riddle of which came first forever.)
We may scoff and call the idea ridiculous, but mankind has scoffed at hundreds of ideas that were previously considered farfetched. Our great-grandparents would have smiled indulgently at the very thought of a cellphone or a GPS that tells where you are or a small machine the size of a paperback book that allows you to talk face-to-face with somebody in faraway Canada, or Australia, from the comfort of your lounge.
These are things we take for granted now, so why should we be at all surprised when our grandchildren go to the kitchen printer and dial themselves a pizza? (“Dad’s so mean. He went and bought a cheap Japanese printer and all it can produce is sushi.”)
Last Laugh
Just before the wedding ceremony the bridegroom sidled up to the vicar and said, “You know the bit about promising to love, honour and obey? Here’s R100 for you if you leave out that section.”
During the ceremony the groom was disappointed to hear the promises had been left in. He grudgingly muttered, “I do.”
Afterwards he rounded on the minister and said: “I paid you to leave out the bit about honouring and obeying. Why did you include it?”
The minister handed back the R100 note and said: “The bride made me a better offer.”