3D-Printed-Food

We’ve 3D-printed plastic, metals, and wood fiber. And now that same technology is being used to make chocolates and pizza. Unlike with most other food, how printed meals taste isn’t the real point. It’s what they can do.

- Lara Sorokanich

Hod Lipson’s laboratory at Columbia University is a place designed to nurture the human instinct to tinker. The space itself is pretty basic: linoleum floor, white walls, natural wood tables. Wires, markers, textbooks, and glue bottles cover most surfaces—the detritus of students designing, making, refining, and tweaking. Robotic models line the shelves: a robot with foot-long plastic wings that look like a housefly’s, miniature machines with exposed silver gears, geometric robotic skeletons. There are laser cutters and microscopes and welding masks hung on hooks. Pushed up against a wall, a robotic arm bears a paper sign: “DANGER. Robot moves without warning. KEEP AWAY.”

Lipson became a professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia in 2015, after fourteen years as a professor at Cornell University. He is a pioneer in the field of three-dimensional printing, and one of the first to experiment with substituting the usual raw materials—plastics, metals—with edible food products. It was in Lipson’s lab about ten years ago that a few of his students had the idea to mess around with it. Somebody tried filling a printer syringe with frosting. Then cheese, chocolate, and other foods. “In the beginning we thought it was frivolous,” Lipson says. “We’d say ‘Look, we printed with chocolate, but let’s get serious and do our battery work.’”

But when writers at The New York Times and the BBC started inquiring about the technology, Lipson saw public interest that he hadn’t anticipated. People who “couldn’t care less about batteries or robotics” suddenly cared about 3D printing when food got involved, he says. Everybody cares about food. A new branch of 3D printing began.