Brave New Food! Homaro Cantu on Algae, Food Printing, and How We'll Feed the Masses!

"Make enough food for everyone. That's the end game.
And to get there, we have to start thinking a little crazier about what food is."

Homaru Cantu is a Chicago chef with some bold new ideas about the future of food.

This is a very pressing question with so many new humans born every year, and the Earth's resources being stretched thin as it is. How are we to ensure that everyone will be fed?

Mr. Cantu's idea: Challenge the very idea of what makes food food!

Wired.com has a great interview up now.

"Wired.com: What is food?

Cantu: It's what enables us to live — and more than that, it's dense energy storage. If you look at it from that point of view, you start shooting two birds with one shot."

So if "food" is just another word for dense calorie storage, that pretty much means that anything that you ingest to provide your body with muscle energy is food.

By this definition, "food" can now be made in a great number of ways.

Like using a laser printer!

Sayeth Mr. Cantu:

"There's two ways to look at it. Let's say you have a food printer and eight cartridges, and grow eight crops on the roof, and that's all you need to replicate any food product you can imagine, from mom's apple pie to a cheeseburger with French fries. That would decentralize the food structure, and you'd know exactly where your food comes from."

Right now we use 3D printers to create everything from new cell phone designs to human organs. Why not just use basic food molecules in place of plastic or cells?

Print a pie! Print a burger! Print some fries to go with that!

(via flickr user oskay)

This amazing object was printed by the superstars over at Evil Mad Scientists Labs using the Candyfab. Is is made by heating white sugar and extruding it in layers.

Obviously this is a major leap from the ways food is thought of and prepared today, but keep in mind that research into what Homaro Cantu is proposing will inevitably lead to refinement, mass production, and ultimately could solve how we go about feeding our billions of brother and sister humans.

And not only that, but "food printing" will come in mighty handy when we decide to start seriously exploring both outer space and the sea bed.

Homaro Cantu is an amazing mind. When asked what he's been up to recently, he replied:

"Homaro Cantu: We've been trying to incorporate food from the green world, and started growing microalgae. You can get 10,000 to 30,000 gallons of algae per acre. It can be grown in salt or fresh water, in a whole variety of temperatures. It increases the food supply rather than depleting it, and it's a net energy gain.

For $300 we built a photobioreactor that produced 15 gallons of food per month. The idea was to take algae, process it into sushi and fuel, and deliver it it in a truck running on algae biofuel. And we're just a bunch of chefs. If we can figure this out, I don't know why others can't."

Here's an algae-makin' bioreactor in action:



In his free time Homaro Cantu works up bioreactors for sushi and fuel. This cat is an absolute hero!

Here is Homaro Cantu's site: Cantu Designs.
And here is the full wired.com interview.

For further reading, check out the amazing wikipedia entries on:

Molecular gastronomy.
Rapid Prototyping.
Algae fuels.


Homaro Cantu, for your algae-loving, sushi creating, forward-thinking ways, in addition to your research into how to feed the Earth's humans, you are the deserving recipient of the SuperForest Good Person Award:

Bravo, Homaro!!!

Little Big Planet + CAD + RepRap = The Make Anything Game?

Good Afternoon!

I was just marveling at the trailer for a new game coming out called Little Big Planet:



As you can see, a huge part of the game play is in designing the levels that you inhabit. This is especially cool because the processing power of the Playstation has gotten so fast that you can create and handle items with stunning real world physics behind their every move.

Create a log and push it over and it will behave like a log pushed over. Differently than, say, a board, or a log with a ball on top, or a sheet of glass.

So a game where you create and modify "real-acting" objects.

Couple that with CAD, the program that designers and engineers use to create 3D renderings.



So now you're playing a game where you create pieces and assemble them into more complex machines, gadgets, buildings, clothing, armor, whatever you like.

I play this cute little game for a while and I assemble a new kind of skateboard for myself.

Wow, a digital rendering of a skateboard! Big whoop, right?

Imagine that after assembling this 3D model, I hit "print."

Imagine that (either in my house or in a business nearby) my rapid prototyping printer hums to life and immediately begins printing a physical model of my skateboard, which I am then free to clean up, attach wheels to, and ride around my neighborhood, (with proper safety gear on of course.)



All I was doing was playing a game, and I inadvertently created a physical object.

That is a mind-boggling thing to be able to do, and yet you could do it this very day.

Imagine how easy it will be to train entire generations in the art of digital design and assembly?!

After all, they'd only be playing games!

It gets even better...

Imagine a complex, multi-player game where your team's mission was to finish puzzle pieces and slide them into a communal digital space, where more players would kludge them together to form larger, more complex objects.

You could build anything.

Need an entirely new type of helicopter? Program the game to treat the object the teams are creating as if it were in a wind tunnel. This would allow real-time flight testing of our helicopter as it is assembled.

Now, do the same for a nuclear reactor. Make the game about efficiently using heat energy. Most efficient design wins.

This is about the inevitable crowd-sourcing of design and invention. By playing simple games, we can all be aeronautical engineers, nuclear reactor designers, fashion magnates.

Right now we have data and call centers in India, working for pennies on the dollar answering phones and dealing with reservations. Imagine the untapped potential of those petabytes of human processing power. Right now that power is being squandered, but give every one of those people a copy of the Make Anything Game and let them go to work collectively on every design and engineering hurdle known to man.

Massive parallel crowd-sourced design.

Now, imagine China getting really into this.
They make everything as it is, imagine if they designed it all as well.

What's really noodle-baking is that this brave new tech will be quaint in 15 years. Quaint! Like a slow ride on a gentle horse.

What will the world be like when everyone is playing the Make Anything Game?

You want to succeed in the brave new world? Play lots of games and get used to working with others.

Amazing.

Z Printer 450

The Z Printer 450 is a self-contained, full color, rapid prototyping 3-D printer. It is so awesomely cool that we cannot describe it's functionality in words.

So, watch this:






Here's the Z Corp site.

So cool, we want one yesterday.