Nano Product: The Food Printer

Are we creating the penicillin or the asbestos of the 21st century? In the months preceding our Nano Supermarket Project, we share some speculative nanotech products with you. Here’s another one in the Nano Supermarket Products series: The Food Printer. And don’t forget to send in your own project for the Nano Supermarket!

Do you remember your parents going on about the molecular delicacies like the Popcorn Cloud or the Cucumber Gin Tonic chef cook Ferran Adrià served in his restaurant El Bulli in Spain? Well, this was at the beginning of the 21st century and while they moan and groan about how things where so much better in their days, you plug in your newest purchase: a food printer, designed by Philips. Cooking becomes playing with LEGO. Add the basic ingredients, play around with the flavour and texture settings, Download the nitrogen cooking plugin. Add nutrition. Wow: vegetables taste like meat, chicken bones melt in your mouth and salads are warm but still crispy. Is this the same thing the United Nations are now shipping to the flooded areas in New New Orleans? Unbelievable. Emergency Aid never tasted better.

You have friends over for dinner tonight and they bring their annoying kids with them. Last time, you spent hours preparing a wonderful meal just to receive a spoiled "don't like that" from them. Luckily enough, your friends kids all have a Twitter Implant since a few months, and since you're following them, you know exactly what they do like. No surprises this time!

You ckeck their tweets of the last weeks and search with the hashtag #fprecipe and quickly stumble upon some nice ideas for a meal for the kids AND for you and your friends. You click your way through some McDonald’s banners advertising foodprinter plugins, but decide to go for something healthier and a bit more original. How about some Nanosushi? Hmm. You did Japanese food the last time… maybe some Chinese? So you download the presets for black 1,000 year eggs and build up your preserved duck's eggs in gelatin cubickles with spring onion, atom by atom in just a few minutes. Would go well with some Ma Po Tofu, so you plugin on of these illegal Sichuan peppercorn cartridges you can buy in Chinatown. Print some noodles with spinach taste and sweet-and-sour fishballs afterwards and there you go!

Purrrr… You receive a tweet. The kids won their own foodprinter in a school contest and some of these McDonald's plugins so your friends cancel the dinner. This leaves you with your girlfriend. ‘Honey, did we have some of these new nanocondoms in stock?’. No answer, you look into your shared agenda that she has an appointment with her girlfriends tonight and wouldn’t be home anyway. You print out a Cordon Blue for yourself. Good night.

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PRODUCER: PHILIPS

EXPECTED TO HIT THE SHELVES IN: 2018

PRICE: €200,– / ADDITIONAL PLUGINS: €0,79 IN THE APPLE iTUNES STORE