Can 3D food printing help improve our diet?

In the next few years, 3D food printing could be used to design customised meals based on specialized dietary requirements

- Jen Thomas

Just when you think that the food industry couldn’t get any weirder, with Metaverses and virtual food immersion experiences, you come across someone, somewhere, who has used a 3D printer to pump out something resembling food that you can eat. Yes, , I’m talking about that infamous 7-ingredient “cheese cake” that engineers just created.

At the moment, 3D printing is like the Wild West, where the sky is the limit, and almost anything you can dream up can be an inspiration to program into the printer.

Out of interest, I took a little journey around Google to find the strangest things that 3D printers have been involved with, and by far, the craziest was a pair of successfully working mouse ovaries. If this seems too far-fetched, I encourage you to look up the article “Strangest Things That Were 3D-Printed in 2017” by Live Science, which details this incredible scientific discovery. You’ll also find references to microscopic race cars, 3D-printed bikinis, and wall-climbing robots. Considering that, a cheesecake doesn’t sound so wild, just a little unappetizing.

We now have ChatGPT, which can write essays and create meal plans, and 3D printers can make treats to eat. But what would be the point of developing this technology? According to an article in Science Direct titled “Printing the future of food: The physics perspective on 3D food printing”, the field of 3D food printing “is poised to revolutionize the gastronomic landscape by offering precise and customized food creations.”