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Printing food for consumption!

S. Ashraf Ahmed
CONSIDER yourself as a publisher, and you have to be at the press for twenty four hours to ensure accurate and timely publication of a book! Do you have to go hungry? Or you wished to savour the most delicious meal of a restaurant at the other end of the world but you do not have the ability to go there. Would you go drooling? Well, a solution to such problem is on the way!
A three-dimensional or 3-D printer in the press next to your 2-D printer will make pizza, pancake or ice cream at the touch of a button. The same 3-D printer should also make the most delicious meal if its recipe is fed into the machine's memory, say from Seattle in Washington state!
A printer will make food? Yes, not only food, a 3-D printer theoretically will make anything you want - toy, fabric, or ornament, or even your heart, not sweetheart though! Soon you should be able to make your eye or kidney if one becomes defective. Of course you will need a surgeon because although you can eat the food by yourself, you should not do a replacement or transplant surgery on yourself. These later biological devices can be made in what is called 3-D bioprinters.
Our normal printers can write only in two dimensions lengthwise and widthwise. A 3-D printer adds a height or thickness above length and width. You must have seen the simplest 3-D printing in embossed wedding cards. The 3-D printing being discussed here uses a virtual model of almost anything in the memory of the printer. The printer is hooked with reservoirs of plastic, colours, metal, ceramic, cell, cellular or food components, or anything that is contained in the virtual model.
In bioprinting, aggregates of tens of thousands of live cells are "printed" or layered on top of another in a specific pattern, and allowed to fuse together naturally.
Founder of Modern Medow, a company pioneering bioprinters said that our current meat consumption requiring 60 million farm animals will nearly double by 2050, pushing us to the limits of the earth's land, water, carbon and other resources. His proposed solution is to create a 3-D bioprinting machine that would use cultured cells as "ink".
Once a cell mass has been excised from an animal, it is possi-
ble to keep on making the same cell in the laboratory for months! The "ink" will be digitised and layered one on top of the other for tissue growth. The tissue then can be given the form of a stake, or further processed as minced or sausage. Flavour, colour or specific taste materials can be added during or after the 3-D printing process to cater all types of consumers. Making meat this way will avoid consumption of live animals, and therefore, of earth's resources.
An article published in the Popular science magazine on November 1 mentioned of an EU study which predicted that If produced in large scale, lab grown meat would use 99.7%, and 94% less land and water, respectively, than farm meat, and would contribute 98.8% less green house gasses.
The main step in the Modern Medow's concept has already been realised. In a major breakthrough in February, researchers were able to fabricate a 3-D bioprinting machine using human embryonic stem cells as "ink" to consistently produce high quality spheroidal aggregates. This success has the great potential of making unlimited supply specialised tissues and human organs should it become necessary.
The second step of the Modern Medow's concept is already in the market. You can have a personalised chocolate of flavour,
taste, colour, shape and design, and even have your name printed on it. A recipe and demonstration for making pancake or cookie is already available free in the net!
What is remaining is the actual meat product with a mouth watering taste.
In another development, the US space agency NASA has awarded a grant to a private company to device a 3-D printing machine to produce fresh meals for astronauts while in space. This technology is based on layering one component on top of another, for example, dough, then oil, then minced meat or other nutritionally rich components. Therefore making pizza or sandwich or hot dog will be the first step. Developer of the technology envisions a much wider user in feeding the hungry millions in famine and disaster-prone areas.
So let us have patience for a meal from a 3-D printer, but for now you can buy a printer at less than $500!
The writer is working as a biomedical scientist in the USA.