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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

synthetic food

Nathan Myhrvold Has A Patent For a Personalized Food Manufacturing System

Nathan Myhrvold is the definition of modern Renaissance man.

Equal parts mad scientist, gastronomy pioneer and patent troll, the former Microsoft CTO and driving force behind the seminal Modernist Cuisine books is an indisputable polymath that is nothing if not prolific when it comes to exploring new ideas around how to make food.

So, when I happened upon a patent recently issued to Myhrvold called “Quantified-self machines, circuits and interfaces reflexively related to food,” I knew I’d stumbled upon something worth investigating.

Like many patents issued to Elwha LLC (an entity tied closely to Myhrvold’s intellectual property firm Intellectual Ventures, an organization which some people, not completely incorrectly, refer as a patent troll), this one is dense and hard to decipher.  But, the more I looked at it, the more I realized it’s an expansive, potentially important patent (as much as you believe patents are important) that describes a system that collects data about a human’s biomarkers, preferences and behavior and connects to a food manufacturing system to create food based on this data.

In short, Myhrvold has a patent for a personalized food manufacturing system.

If you’re still confused, I don’t blame you. The patent itself is 266 pages long and mostly consists of extremely confusing language about electronic interface systems and semiconductors. Thankfully, the patent had some graphics that helped me decipher what exactly this system is all about.

Such as this one:

The diagram above describes a system that gathers data from a person, including biomarker data as well as health and activity levels, and then can communicate the data to a “food fabricator” or “food ingredient supplier.” The data can also be used to create end-user applications that include subscription services from “kiosk food fabricator networks” or “manufacturers of food fabricators.” Some of the companies that the patent cites as examples of makers of food fabricators include 3D Systems (a 3D printing company that has worked on a food 3D printer), Natural Machines (a 3D food printer company) and other home appliance brands such as Whirlpool, KitchenAid, and Samsung.

If you, like me, are a little confused about what exactly a “kiosk food fabricator network” is, perhaps this diagram from the patent can help:

From what I can tell, the above graphic shows a futuristic kiosk network of vending machines that can manufacture food based on preferences determined by the analysis of the data provided by Myhrvold’s personalized food system.

If that idea isn’t crazy enough, what makes that idea even more intriguing is Myhrvold’s company was issued another patent the same day which describes a vending machine for personalized food creation. The patent, called “Ingestion intelligence acquisition system and method for ingestible material preparation system and method”, includes a graphic of what looks to be a vending machine for personalized food manufacturing:

While this concept of a personalized food vending machine is fascinating, just as fascinating is the names included on this patent such as Chris Young (founder of ChefSteps and coauthor of Modernist Cuisine) and Neal Stephenson, the prolific cyberpunk writer and futurist for Magic Leap.

So, is Myhrvold and his network of inventor friends looking to create a future where food is manufactured for us based on personal data gathered from our own bodies, past behavior, and environmental data?

Maybe.

As I mentioned earlier, the founder of Modernist Cuisine also has a pretty significant business around creating and buying patents for all sorts of interesting new ideas, many of which may never see the light of day. But, given Myhrvold’s pedigree as both a gastronomy pioneer and prolific collector of crazy patents for just about everything, it’s worth at least paying attention to and wondering what exactly type of future the guy behind Modernist Cuisine envisions for our personalized food future.

Teleported Sushi Has Big Implications for Digital Food

When I first heard internet murmurings that a company had figured out a way to teleport sushi, I immediately thought of one of my favorite childhood films: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. (The old version, not the new one with creepy Johnny Depp.)

Near the end of the movie, Wonka gives his diminishing troupe of children a tour of the factory’s teleporting technology, which has the power to “beam” you a chocolate bar through your T.V. As a chocolate lover and a T.V. lover, I was smitten. But I assumed that this technology would probably never become a reality, at least outside of Wonka.

How happy I am to be wrong!

A Japanese company called Open Meals premiered their “sushi teleportation” technology at SXSW2018, conducting what they call “the world’s first food data transmission.” In the demonstration, sushi that was designed in Tokyo was printed, via Open Meals’ Pixel Food Printer, in Austin, TX.

Their sushi currently prints in 5-millimeter blocks, giving the results a pixellated look straight out of an 80’s video game. However, they hope to reduce the size to 1-millimeter blocks, which would give the food a more organic, realistic appearance.

This demonstration was just the beginning of Open Meals’ plan to transform the way that food is created and transported. Eventually, Open Meals hopes to be able to transmit ingredients and whole dishes, using data and something that their website calls “Social Food Network Services.” They want to usher in what they dub the “fifth food revolution,” whose hallmarks are the “digitalization, transmission, and re-generation of food.”

Open Meals’ Pixel Food Printer isn’t the only 3D food printer out there; there’s also the Foodini and Dovetailed, and scientists at Carnegie Mellon recently came up with a way to DIY a 3D bioprinter. But its approach is unique. Instead of using food paste in a canister, sugar, or liquid as its medium, their machine (patent pending) uses data to set exact specifications to mimic the nutrients, color, texture, and flavor of a specific food, which it then adds to a gel pixel. The robotic arm “prints” this customized gel into a miniature 3D cube, which it stacks to reproduce the appearance of the food its replicating.

Open Meals’ Pixel Food Printer

The sushi demonstration was certainly flashy, but in my opinion the real potential for Open Meals’ vision lies in its Food Base project.

Their digital food platform allows users to search, upload, download, and share data, such as taste, texture, nutrient composition, and color/shape, for specific ingredients or dishes. They can then send that specific food’s data profile up to their connected Pixel Food Printer, which will recreate it.

Open Meals hopes to source data from Michelin-star restaurants, home cooks, television shows, and even food-themed art to populate its database.

Obviously we have a long way to go before we reach a time when digitized, teleported food is feasible on a large scale. You would never mistake Open Meals’ “transported” sushi for the real thing, and apparently the taste was nowhere near bluefin tuna or prawn.

But the implications of what they’re doing is huge, way beyond just a cool-looking trick for SXSW. OpenMeals wants to digitize food like Apple and others digitized music, democratizing it — at least for those who can afford its Pixel Food Printer. (The machine is currently a prototype, but if mass marketed will no doubt fetch a pretty penny.)

Open Meals’ digital food database.

Extrapolating from the claims on Open Meals’ website, a future with digitized, printable food could:

  • Allow for carefully calibrated meals for people with illnesses like diabetes, or athletes with restrictive diets. This could become especially popular as demand for personalized diets is on the rise.
  • Provide on-demand, nutritious food to disaster areas or combat zones where farming infrastructure is weak. That is, assuming the printed food and its corresponding 3D bioprinters would ever be affordable enough for disaster relief organizations to purchase in bulk.
  • Preserve traditional dishes, from cultural hallmarks to mom’s beef stroganoff recipe. Because we all know how hard it is to make food exactly like mom does.
  • Replicate elaborate dishes from cooking shows, so you can eat along with the T.V. (Way better than Smell-O-Vision.)
  • Help lab-grown meat mimic the texture of bluefin tuna or ribeye steak.
  • Be beamed into space so that astronauts can enjoy a wide variety of meals without having to pack a lot of heavy food. This is especially intriguing as NASA gears up for the 2030 mission to Mars. 

Open Meals hasn’t given a timeline for their goals to digitize the future of food. Until they do, I’ll just have to keep dreaming of the taste of a teleported chocolate bar.

Beyond Meat Burgers Blew Me Away

I love cheeseburgers, but the harmful environmental effects of raising beef has all but sapped my appetite for them. Which is why I’m so excited by alterna-meats (or whatever we’ll wind up calling them), and why I was even more excited to see that my local grocer has finally started carrying Beyond Meat burger patties.

Filled with the same adventurous spirit Mike and Catherine had on their recent Impossible foods field trip, I snapped up a package of Beyond Meat burgers and rushed home to do my own taste test.

We’ve written a lot about Beyond Meat. They use pea protein as the basis for their burgers and have celebrity backers like Bill Gates and Leonardo DiCaprio. Their company wants stores to stock their burgers in the meat aisle, which is not without controversy.

Unlike earlier incarnations of “veggie burgers,” which often just substituted beans, soy, or tofu for beef and called it a day, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are trying to replicate the experience of eating meat. So have they succeeded?

Hell yes they have.

Beyond Meat burgers probably won’t fool any die-hard carnivores (they don’t “bleed” like Impossible burgers), but if you don’t have to have beef, this is an excellent substitute. When I sampled them, I found Beyond Meat burgers flavorful and light, with a pleasing texture that was beef-like.

Which is good, because Beyond Meat burgers are not cheap. It was $6.49 for just two patties. Despite Beyond Meat’s marketing demands, their burgers were located in the meat alternative section in the freezer aisle, instead of in between the ground beef and sausage links.

Frozen, they look just like thick beef patties. As they cook, they don’t brown very much, staying pretty rose-colored. I cooked my patties frozen, which, in retrospect, was a mistake. It required a longer cook time to warm the middle and I feel I may have overcooked the outside. Next time I’ll thaw them out fully before putting them on the stove.

Once cooked, I covered my burger with cheese and slid it on to a bun. I decided to eat it without any ketchup or mustard or other added flavorings to get the best sense of its taste. Beyond Meat definitely has that umami flavor, but the word that lingers most as I think back on eating it is… springy. The burger felt light and delicate — without being fragile — but it also had this elasticity to it. This gave it more of a meat texture, though it didn’t feel as dense or heavy as beef.

The biggest sensation I got from my experience eating a Beyond Meat burger was excitement. I loved every bite. And I can’t wait to make another one. I’d like the price to come down a bit, if only to entice more people to try it, but I’m sure that will come. Until then, I’m just happy to be eating cheeseburgers without any guilt.

What’s in a Name (for Lab-grown Meat)?

A classic Portlandia sketch is one about the organic chicken served in a restaurant. In it, Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein ask a server increasingly specific questions about the origins of the poultry they are about to order.

If you thought choosing between organic, grass-fed, free-range, GMO, and locally sourced animal proteins was tough, just wait a few years, because the rise of lab-grown meats is going to add an entirely new layer of complexity to what and how we label our meat choices.

Portlandia - In the restaurant

Lab grown meats aren’t even widely available yet, but they’re enough of a concern that the United States Cattlemen’s Association (USCA) filed a petition with the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, asking for new beef labeling requirements.

From the USCA’s petition:

USCA requests that FSIS limit the definition of beef to product from cattle born, raised, and harvested in the traditional manner. Specifically, FSIS should require that any product labeled as “beef” come from cattle that have been born, raised, and harvested in the traditional manner, rather than coming from alternative sources such as a synthetic product from plant, insects, or other non-animal components and any product grown in labs from animal cells.

The USCA wants to make sure that anything labeled “beef” or “meat” in your grocery store or restaurant comes straight from a once-living cow, without a stopover in a lab.

But you can understand why the USCA might have a, well, beef with these newcomers, as lab-grown meat has received a lot of investor interest recently. Just last week, Tyson Foods announced it had invested an undisclosed sum of money into Memphis Meats, which also counts Cargill and Bill Gates among its investors. Then there’s SuperMeat, the Israeli company that raised $3 million last month for its lab-grown chicken. And lest we forget, Leonardo DiCaprio invested in Beyond Meat last summer.

Before we go any further, let’s pause to accept--and then set aside--the larger moral and philosophical issues that we will have to wrestle with as lab-grown meats become more mainstream. Those are very real, and deserve their own blog post. But before we can even start to have a serious discussion about those issues, we need to solve the basic question about what names we’ll even use.

First, there’s the big question of what we call the entire category. “Lab meat” or “cultured meat” or “clean meat” are options, and each come with their own set of implications. For example, does “clean meat” mean everything else is “dirty?”

From there, things get more complex. Even among just Memphis Meats and SuperMeat, there will different labeling issues. Both currently use animal serum to grow their lab-cultured meat, but both are also working on methods that don’t require any animal byproduct. Each version will require their own label to give conscientious consumers more informed decisions (and to provide a marketing hook). Then there’s Beyond Meat, which isn’t meat at all but made from pea-protein—but is sold in the meat aisle at the grocery stores.

Now imagine going to the store to buy a burger in a couple of years. Your options will be ground beef from once-alive cows, animal serum-based lab meat, non-animal-serum lab meat, and plant-based patties that “bleed.” One can only imagine how new sub-categories will pop up to match existing labels such as “organic,” “non-GMO,” and “local.”

And that doesn’t even touch on the animal proteins being grown from other animals such as SuperMeat’s chicken and Finless Foods’ lab grown fish.

It’s a lot to think about, and we won’t solve it all here. In fact, it’s a topic I’m sure we’ll be discussing a lot here as new products come to market, names are tested and customers begin to show their preferences.

Personally, I’m excited for the expanded options and can’t wait to try them all. But what do you think? How should new lab-grown meats be labeled? Does the USCA have a legitimate point? Leave a comment below and let us know.

SuperMeat Raises $3M Seed for its Lab-Grown Chicken

Israeli startup SuperMeat, which is developing lab-grown chicken meat, announced today that it has raised $3 million in seed funding (hat tip to TechCrunch) and formed a partnership with PHW, one of Europe’s largest poultry producers.

SuperMeat is among the new crop of startups looking to reduce our reliance on meat and the harmful side effects of raising animals for food. In the case of SuperMeat, the company uses cells that are “painlessly extracted” from chickens and then cultured and grown in a lab.

If successful, the company’s lab-grown meat could help the environment by eliminating the land use, energy and food that goes into raising chickens. SuperMeat also says its lab-grown meat will be healthier for people because it reduces the amount of antibiotics used in meat production. It also helps to thwart pandemics such as bird and swine flu.

While SuperMeat currently uses animal serum, according to its website, the company is developing technology that will eliminate that need, making its products “suitable for meat eaters, vegetarians and vegans alike.”

SuperMeat isn’t alone in its quest to ethically sate the hunger of carnivores worldwide. Both Hampton Creek and Memphis Meats (which is backed by Bill Gates) are looking to create lab-grown meat from animal cells. Then there are companies like Beyond Meat (also backed by Bill Gates) and Impossible Foods (also backed by Bill Gates), which create plant-based meat.

We at The Spoon said alterna-meats was a space to watch this year. Look for more funding news and more innovative meats to hit your grocery aisles and restaurant menus in 2018.

This Startup Just Figured Out How to Create the Perfect Vegan Gummy Bear

For hundreds of years, humans have used gelatin to create consumer goods: as a cooking agent, in medicines and cosmetics, and as an essential element of candies like marshmallow and gummy bears.

Trouble is, making gelatin basically involves dropping the skin, bone, and connective tissue of animals into acid or alkaline baths—a process that doesn’t exactly line up with today’s rising standards for cleaner eating.

But don’t give up on those Haribo frog candies yet. Geltor is currently at work engineering a solution for those with a sweet tooth who prefer not to eat acid-dipped horse bones. The company programs microbes so they produce produce collagen—from which gelatin is made—via a fermentation process, leaving out the animal parts altogether.

Geltor grows the microbes in large fermentation tanks in its San Leandro, Calif. facility. The microbes, which naturally produce protein, are given instructions in the form of DNA sequences to create the collagen.

“Recombinant proteins are critical to the post-animal economy,” Geltor CEO and founder Alex Lorestani said in an interview last year. “They are also difficult and expensive to manufacture.” Lorestani believes his company’s platform can help build the necessary proteins for animal-free gelatin at a lower cost than was previously possible. Food manufacturers might then be able to seriously consider gelatin alternatives in their foods that can mimic the form and consistency of the real thing without having to include animal parts in the process.

The gelatin market is right now close to $3 billion. At the same time, however, there’s rising demand for alternative forms of gelatin that don’t rely on animal proteins to produce. It’s not just vegans causing this demand. Those with religious restrictions around food have to steer clear of some gelatins (namely, pork-derived gelatin, which is neither halal nor kosher). And there are concerns about animal diseases making their way into gelatin-based candies (BSE, for example).

While there are some substitutes already available on the market—pectin, agar, guar gum—anyone who’s ever tasted a “vegan gummy bear” knows it’s notoriously difficult to replicate the real deal.

Geltor’s platform addresses this very issue. The big question is whether it can do so at scale.

Lorestani and Co. say they are about five years from producing their gelatin in commercial-sized quantities for food industry buyers, though they reportedly already have a long wait list of potential buyers. The company also has to consider regulatory issues—namely, proving their product is a safe alternative.

Right now there’s not much in the way of competition. That will undoubtedly change over the next five years, since it’s more than just the candy makers need gelatin to make their products. Once the pharmaceutical and personal care companies get onboard, expect to hear lots of noise coming from this corner of the biotech world.

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Are Digestible Food Sensors The Answer To Our Food Waste Problem?

We humans waste a whole lot of food.

According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, roughly one-third of food gets spoiled, which translates to about $1 trillion annually. At almost double the size of the US grocery industry, it’s safe to say we have a food waste problem.

One way to reduce food waste is to maintain optimal environmental conditions such as temperature, moisture levels, and UV exposure. If we could strike the right balance for these environmental factors during transport, in the warehouse, at retail or even in our homes, it would extend the life of our food and help to reduce waste significantly.

Normally this type of job is perfect for the Internet of Things. Today low-cost sensors are used everywhere to track a variety of conditions across the worlds of agriculture, warehousing and in grocery stores. But food is a particularly thorny challenge since it’s difficult to accurately monitor food conditions with sensors that are not consumable by humans.

But now there may be hope. That’s because a group of researchers led by Giovanni Salvatore at ETH Zurich have developed a biocompatible microsensor that can be directly applied to food and is safe to eat. The sensor is made from a combination of edible materials such as magnesium and a compostable polymer made with corn and food starch.

According to Salvatore, the sensors can be used in a variety of scenarios, including transportation of food on cargo ships. “In preparation for transport to Europe, fish from Japan could be fitted with tiny temperature sensors, allowing them to be continuously monitored to ensure they are kept at a cool enough temperature,” said Salvatore.

While these types of edible sensors hold lots of promise, we’re still a ways off from seeing them in everyday use. One issue is cost: making them is currently very expensive, compared to pennies or even fractions of pennies for traditional RFID tags. But the biggest challenge for this technology is bio-compatible sensors will still require a local transmitter to send signals to the outside world. That transmitter and power source would typically be something like a Bluetooth radio and battery, and as of today, researchers have not figured out how to make these systems digestible.

But according to Salvatore, that’s only a matter of time. Per Futurity:

Salvatore predicts that these biodegradable sensors will be part of our everyday lives within 5 to 10 years, depending on the level of interest shown by industry. By that time, the battery, processor, and transmitter would probably be integrated into the microsensor, Salvatore explains.

You can find the research paper from Salvatore and his team here and see a video produced by the team below.

Biodegradable microsensors: the link between food products and the Internet of Things?

The Spoon Top 3: Gates Invests In Meat Alternatives, Booze Delivery Heats Up & SideChef Gets Sharp

It’s the Spoon’s video top 3, recapping three trending stories about the future of food, cooking and the kitchen from the past week.

Want to go deeper? Here are the stories in this week’s recap:

Bill Gates invests in post-livestock meat company, Memphis Meats

Home booze delivery marketplace heats up

SideChef announces first platform win with Sharp to power the consumer appliance company brands smart kitchen efforts. 

Food Tech Innovators Search for Meat Alternatives to Save People and the Planet

Nothing draws attention to a new food technology like announcing an investment from billionaires Bill Gates and Richard Branson. Such is the case with Memphis Meats, a San Leandro, California-based company that creates what is commonly referred to as “post-livestock” meat. This handle represents a new frontier in which meat, and now poultry, is created in a lab environment by harvesting stem cells from animals.

Gates, Branson, and ag powerhouse Cargill added $17 million to Memphis Meats’ coffers, which now totals more than $22 million raised. The money will likely be used to refine the complex process of transforming animal muscle cells into food as well as addressing the challenge of bringing the cost down from $18,000 a pound.  The benefits, as company CEO points out, cut across many issues—some far beyond food supply – facing society.

“The world loves to eat meat, and it is core to many of our cultures and traditions,” said Memphis Meats co-founder and CEO Uma Valeti in a press release. “Meat demand is growing rapidly around the world. We want the world to keep eating what it loves. However, the way conventional meat is produced today creates challenges for the environment, animal welfare and human health.”

Among those working in the lab-grown meat space, Memphis Meats has been the most visible. The company has been quick to use video to speak to its goals as well as showcase taste tests. After much research, they are able to showcase the result which greatly resembles meat and has a satisfactory taste.

The World's First Cell-based Meatball - Memphis Meats

Even though Memphis Meats, and its competitors—Mosa Meat, Super Meats and Impossible Foods—are at least a few years from affordable commercialization of their products, there is a lot of discussion around the goals and impact of lab-grown animal proteins. The issues include impact on climate change, whether this new breed of protein is vegan (it does little to harm animals) and how/if/when this new food technology will make its way down the food chain to aid those in food deserts and undeveloped countries.

Impact on climate change has been a hot topic and often is a catalyst for those concerned with the environment to make the switch from carnivore to vegetarian or vegan. Reports claim that raising livestock is responsible for 51% of gas emissions in the atmosphere. Would reducing methane in the air bring those who cut meat out of their diets back to a beefier mealtime?

Which takes us to many startups approaching the meat supply issue by creating a viable substitute using plant-based protein. Tried-and-true healthy food companies such as Amy’s Kitchen, Boca and Dr. Praeger have introduced “burgers” that offer an alternative to beef, but offer a very “unmeat” experience. Beyond Meat, a non-soy, non-GMO plant-based burger that comes close to a true hamburger experience in look, feel and taste with the use of pea protein.

Based in El Segundo, Calif., Beyond Meat’s plant-based products are carried by a number of grocery stores with the company sharing one thing in common with Memphis Meats—Bill Gates is a major investor.

Claiming an even more real meat-like experience is startup Impossible Foods’ burger. Along with plant-based products such as coconut oil and potatoes, Impossible include heme, an ingredient found in plants that can be fermented with the result giving the burger a bloody look which yields a taste that pleases many carnivores.  Impossible’s burgers are making their way into retail stores as well as on to the menu of some burger chains.

Forecasting the success of the varying approaches to alterative meat products must identify a tipping point at which consumers put down their Big Macs and vote with the wallets to try something new to satisfy their burger cravings. An interesting study indicates if such a change were to take place, it could take up to a decade to materialize, powered by today’s millennials.

Dissident, a social trend forecasting firm in the UK found that millennials do not find it socially responsible to eat meat to excess without consideration of the impact on our environment. The report also found more than 25% of those 18-24 years of age will have a diet that is nearly meat-free by 2025. The question remains, who in the food tech space has the capital and patience to wait until the market demand catches up with innovation.

Is Instant Aging the New Frontier for Wine?

When it comes to wine, most of us know that time for aging is essential. The last thing we want is what Steve Martin refers to in The Jerk as “fresh wine,” and many fine wines go through extensive filtration processes and years of barrel aging. At Cavitation Technologies Inc. (CVAT), though, researchers have come up with a patented process that can purportedly duplicate and even improve upon the wine aging process — all in a matter of seconds.

Specifically, Cavitation Technologies has a patent on:

“A method and device for manipulating alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages to obtain desirable changes in the beverages, comprising subjecting said beverages to a flow-through hydrodynamic cavitation process and continuing the application of such process for a period of time sufficient to produce a consumable product. In the case of wine, the method includes altering the composition and accelerating the conversion of ingredients to obtain wine with a superior homogeny, an extended shelf life and a mouth feel, flavor, bouquet, color and body resembling those of wine that was subjected to a traditional oak barrel maturation.”

In the following video from MoneyTV, CVAT’s Global Technology Manager and founder, Roman Gordon, demonstrates that it only takes about two minutes for the process to execute, when applied to making cognac:

As noted in the video, the cavitation reactor changes the composition of the beverage at the molecular level, encapsulating the water clusters around alcohol clusters, and simultaneously removing the unhealthy impurities that are in alcoholic drinks, including methanol and butanol.

The folks at CVAT originally developed their patented technology for use in edible oil refining, algal oil extraction, and renewable fuel production. They are now looking into how to bring their technology to market for consumers, and, as the patent notes, it can be applied to much more than just replicating the effects of aging on wine.  As reported by Equities.com, CVAT’s leaders also claim that their process can eliminate the hangover effect following drinking. Imagine the market for that.

Beyond the wine and beverage industries, there is also active research underway on techniques for instantly fabricating food customized for your DNA and health needs. And, 3D printing is also giving rise to many new culinary approaches. Take a look at the colorful, geometrically complex sugar-based shapes and concepts seen here, which make your local diner’s sugar cubes look downright unimaginative. Many such concepts have been shown at the 3D Food Printing Conference in Venlo, the Netherlands.  Chefs have also created five-course 3D-printed meals, and scientists have created 3D-printed beef.

Designer Biohacking: At the Intersection of Building Food and Optimizing Health

What happens when a highly skilled designer focuses on food? In the case of Chloé Rutzerveld, who is based in the Netherlands, she set up a food concept and design business that focuses on everything from designer biohacking of food to 3D-printed food concepts. Her Edible Growth project focuses on combining aspects of design, science and technology to make our food more efficient, healthy and sustainable.

According to Munchies: “Using layers of edible plants, seeds, spores, and other microorganisms, Edible Growth creates intricate small meals that combine living mushrooms and greens with the mechanization of the most industrialized foods. In a nutshell, the Edible Growth products are composed of a nutritious base, or ‘edible matrix,’ of nuts, fruits, agar, and protein (which can even come from insects) that are extruded by a 3D printer. That matrix becomes the soil, more or less, for sprouting seeds, yeasts, beneficial bacteria, and mushroom spores to grow in over the course of five days. Finally, there’s a crust layer composed of carbohydrates and more protein, to hold everything else like a little superfood pastry.”

Here, you can see some of these concepts. The emerging field of food-focused “designer biohacking” also runs down to more basic, structural engineering of food and beverages, though. For example, The Odin is a company focused on “consumer genetic design” that sells kits for making green, fluorescent beer. The beer is based on a protein found in jellyfish that can be engineered into yeast. Customers execute this conversion themselves and the yeast can also be used to hack and morph champagne.

According to The Odin:

“Our goal with this kit is to begin to integrate synthetic biology and genetic design into people’s everyday life. We see a future in which people are genetically designing the plants they use in their garden, eating yogurt that contains a custom bacterial strain they modified or even someday brewing using an engineered yeast strain. Yeast is an integral part of our lives. It can used be used for brewing, baking, fermentation or as a research tool. Genetically Engineering yeast in your home seems like Science Fiction but is actually now reality. Using our kit you can make your yeast fluoresce and glow by inserting a gene from a jellyfish, the Green Flourescent Protein(GFP). This kit comes with everything you need to engineer a Mead Yeast we provide or your own favorite yeast that you provide.”

At the intersection of design and fanciful food concepts, 3D printing is also giving rise to many new culinary approaches. Take a look at the colorful, geometrically complex sugar-based shapes and concepts seen here, which make your local diner’s sugar cubes look downright unimaginative. Many such concepts have been shown at the 3D Food Printing Conference in Venlo, the Netherlands.  Chefs have created five-course 3D-printed meals, and scientists have created 3D-printed beef.

Meanwhile, home food reactors that make food using only electricity, carbon dioxide and organisms from the air we breathe are headed our way. Researchers from Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT) and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland have successfully produced single cell protein in the lab using only water, electricity, carbon dioxide and small organisms obtained from the environment. The end result is a breakthrough that, if commercialized, could result in solar powered home food reactors that produce protein and carb-packed food. The process could also be leveraged to produce food for livestock, from, essentially, nothing.

The industrial design and 3D printing communities may also want to pay attention to personalized food fabrication. It is an emerging field that has great promise. Dr. Amy Logan, a team leader for dairy science at The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), has just launched a three-year study into the personalized fabrication of smart food systems. Logan’s research team will focus on instantly available diagnostics and how 3D printing or similar technologies can fabricate genetically targeted food to correct deficiencies. The diagnostics may leverage, of all things, human sweat.

Hacking the basic building blocks of food is inevitably going to intersect with hacking our bodies for more optimal health outcomes. “I think the future of food will go in multiple directions,” Chloe Rutzerveld has said. “It’ll all be very high tech and monitor the body.”

Building Wine and Meat Molecule by Molecule

“Engineering wines to perfection molecule by molecule.” That’s the tagline of Ava Winery, which is creating synthetic wines without grapes, yeast, or even fermentation.

Mardonn Chua and Alec Lee are the entrepreneurs behind Ava Winery. They create compounds with ethanol that mimic the chemical composition of wines, but that will sell for much less money. The full process involves experimenting with mixes of amino acids, sugars, and ethanol, and they have also tried mimicking the taste of 1992 Dom Perignon.

If you’re interested in the detail-by-detail mechanics involved in mimicking wines, read Mardonn Chua’s Medium post here, where he lays out recipes tried during experiments.

Ava Winery has shown tenacity in the face of critics, too. The editors at New Scientist grabbed headlines when they compared Ava Winery’s Moscato to a plastic “pool shark,” with “essence of plastic bag,” which prompted the winery to respond: “Nothing resembling plastic is an ingredient in the wine, taste is deeply subjective.”

Ava Winery sees the promise of its form of “hacking” extending beyond just wine, and its founders note: “This is what the future of foods looks like: food will be scanned and printed as easily as photographs today. These digital recreations will be identical chemical copies of the originals, capturing the same nutritional values, flavors, and textures of their ‘natural’ counterparts. Part scientists and part artists, our canvas will be macronutrients like starches and proteins; our pixels will be flavor molecules.”

Indeed, Ava Winery’s vision of creating synthetic wine is hardly the only game in town on the synthetic food and wine scene. Memphis Meats, impossible Foods and other companies are focused on synthetic meat and food, and Beyond Meat has gotten rave reviews for its synthetic burgers and also gained interest from both Bill Gates and his former Microsoft buddy Nathan Myhrvold.

In fact, Gates has penned a very interesting post titled “Future of Food,” where he notes the following: “The chicken taco I ate was made using Beyond Meat’s chicken alternative. I wasn’t the only one fooled by how real it tasted. New York Times food writer Mark Bittman couldn’t tell the difference between Beyond Meat and real chicken either. You can read his review here.” Gates has put his money where his mouth is and invested in Beyond Meat, as have others.

A video on Beyond Meat’s vision of taking animal protein out of the food chain is available here:

And then there’s the Impossible Burger. While Beyond Meat is working with other burger joints like Burgerfi to put their meat-alternative in the hands of consumers, Impossible Foods – the brain child of DNA microarray inventor Patrick O. Brown – decided to not only create a plant based burger that bleeds, but to create a national chain of restaurants – to sell the Impossible Burger.

While Ava Winery is focused on triggering the same pleasure receptors that are triggered when we consume a traditionally fermented fine wine, companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have the potential to create inexpensive alternatives to meat that could make a profound nutritional difference for people all around the world.

According to Ava Winery’s Alec Lee: “Today we’re on the cusp of significant technological breakthroughs in food production the likes of which have never been seen before. It took humanity nearly 10,000 years of agriculture to develop many of the crops and animal herds we consume today. It took only a few centuries to develop the farming tools that have culminated in large-scale, efficient mechanized farming. And it only took decades to marry science with food allowing us to directly manipulate the genetic constructs of our food.”

It’s worth watching Lee’s video, where he expands on these concepts and explores Ava Winery’s strategy:

Image credit: Flickr user Star5112