New Scientist – COVER STORY August 2005

The Amazing Food Replicator

by Hazel Muir

….If it was on a space station the machine would have to be compact, perhaps the size of a domestic fridge. That means it would have to work with a small range of long life ingredients, yet still make recognizable foods for them. Bonaneau hopes to identify the minimum basic ingredients, or food “phenomes”, from which you make decent replicas of many familiar foods. He has no idea yet what those ingredients would be. Ideally though, it would be possible to make a product that looks and tastes like puff pastry, for instance, but contains no fresh butter. Thats going to require some ingenious thinking.

And work by Chef Homaro Cantu, head chef at a Chicago restaurant called Moto, is helping to make this a reality. Cantu has devised some ingenious tricks, including making a Canon ink-jet printer dispense fruit and vegetable inks onto edible paper (NEW SCIENTIST 12 FEBRUARY 2005 P23). He prints out sushi that looks and tastes like the real thing, but contains no fish or seaweed. Bonabeau hopes to pick up a few tips from him. Though Cantu has not yet divulged the secrets of his techniques…….