Come On Over and I’ll Print A Lasagna or Pizza For Dinner!

I spent far to much of my youth riding my snowboard, so getting me into MIT would probably involve both bribes and plastic surgery. But if I had, the MIT Media Lab is for sure the place to be if you wanna tap into the future for real.
Hidden in room 320 you’ll find Pattie Maes and her Fluid Interfaces Research Group. This is a part of MIT where the goal is to radically rethink the human-machine interactive experience. Pattie and her students has already brought us tons of cool stuff like the wearable computer interface and the Stiftables (that I’ve written about before).
Well, this morning when I browsed through the Shapeways blog I feasted my eyes onto the Fluid Groups latest vision for the future – a 3D food printer called Cornucopia. You heard me right. The 3D food printer.

This little beauty, yet to be seen in real life, will let you print your food. Get it? Cornucopia’s cooking process starts with an array of food canisters, which refrigerate and store a user’s favorite ingredients. These are piped into a mixer and extruder head that can accurately deposit elaborate combinations of food. While the deposition takes place, the food is heated or cooled by Cornucopia’s chamber or the heating and cooling tubes located on the printing head.

You basically press Lasagna on the printer control panel and bam – there’s your fresh (maybe not fresh in that sense) Lasagna. All you have to do now is eat. But who knows, we might sort that problem out sooner than too.
ps. I love to cook so I’m not all that exited about this machine. But I can definitely think of days when I’d love to print a Bearnaise sauce or some ‘home made’ Tabasco. On the other hand – what do we define as cooking?