Easy-Bake Ovens and Biotechnological Advancement
September 25, 2002. 3:25 p.m.
Four-year-olds Shannon and Samantha are on a mission to bake chocolate cake.
The shiny pink Easy-Bake Oven stares down at them from the green laminate countertop, just out of reach. Samantha, always taller than Shannon, heaves the metal stepstool out of the pantry and cautiously climbs up so the oven’s at eye level.
She throws the little white packet of cake mix down to Shannon. It hits her in the face. “Ha!”
The girls sit on the floor (very sanitary, I know), combining cake batter and water in a blue and white patterned ceramic bowl. It’s lumpy and not mixed, and they eat half of it in the process, but they’ve got cake batter!
Shannon pours it into the tiny metal cake tins. Samantha climbs timidly back up the stepstool and uses the small pink tongs to insert the cake into the Easy-Bake oven. “Yes!” They high five.
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Aside from the fact that we forgot to turn on the oven (probably a good thing in terms of, you know, fire safety), our adventure with the Easy-Bake is a great allegory for how it will feel to use your home printer for the first time.
Printers aren’t that dissimilar to kitchen machines like Easy-Bake Ovens and microwaves, which once seemed shiny and new and scary, too. Let’s break down what they do in super basic terms:
Plain and simple, bioprinting is making food items by layering organic materials, like cells, one on top of another. V. Mironov of 3D Bioprinting Solutions defines biofabrication as “the production of complex living and non-living biological products from raw materials such as living cells, molecules, extracellular matrices, and biomaterials.” A bioprinter uses bioink, made up of cells suspended in medium, to do this.
3D printing food then uses pre-existing food materials put into a new shape or combined to form a recipe. It’s often on a larger scale.
While bioprinting is technically a type of 3D printing, for our purposes we’ll differentiate between printing new cells with bioprinting and creating larger food items through extrusion with traditional 3D printing.
Different machines may do one or the other, but the one I envision in your kitchen is all-in-one. I propose a cost-effective combination of cell-generating bioprinting and traditional 3D printing capable of producing an entire meal. First, the ingredients will be bioprinted. Then those ingredients will be 3D-printed to create and cook a larger recipe. Just load in the bioink, select the correct program to print what you’d like, and you’re good to go.
Bioprinting has the potential for huge nutrition personalization, for lowering food waste, for solving problems of hunger, and for innovating the types of foods we eat (i.e. the onset of bioprinted meats). 3D printing has the benefit of reducing labor time, effort, and cost and allowing for fast cooking.
Now imagine a technology that combines the two. Let’s make pasta with chicken. First, the bioprinting method is used to produce the raw materials for the recipe: the chicken and the ingredients for pasta. Then, the 3D printing method is used to make the pasta dough, deposit it into noodles, and cook it. The sauce is combined and deposited over the pasta. The bioprinted chicken is cooked, laid on top of the pasta, and sauce is added. Let’s eat!
But let’s say this meal is for your mom with diabetes and your grandma with dementia. You can bioprint the ingredients for each meal separately to provide them with nutrients ideal for alleviating their symptoms. During the ingredient-printing process, extra protein or higher levels of vitamin content can be imbued into the food.
Not that different from ripping open a pack of Easy-Bake cake mix, right? As long as you can reach the counter, you’ll be fine.
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Contact me at sgt26@georgetown.edu with any and all questions or thoughts. To learn more, check out Printing Your Dinner: Personalization in the Future of Food, launching June 11 on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.
