Food for Thought

[thewayne]

We've developed several technologies that we first saw on Star Trek in the 1960s: the communicator (cell phones), the hypospray, we're actually using iPhones with attachments to do medical diagnosis and there's a competition to develop a medical tricorder: that's all that I can think off right now.

Let's think about the Star Trek replicator, specifically for providing food. We now have 3D printing, and people are experimenting with said printers for making food. Obviously we're not going to have the starship Enterprise in 100 years, but we could have something providing the functionality of a food replicator.

So here's my question: given that at some point we develop a food replicator and it can produce pretty much any food we ask of it, a hundred years after that point: do you think we are all tremendously overweight, or are we healthier?

I would expect binge experimentation, hopefully we would have improved medical tech and we don't instantly eat ourselves to extinction. When I posed the question to my wife, she wondered about making food healthy without it being detectable we could dial-up Coq Au Vin on-demand, we could live off bacon cheeseburgers and double cheese pizza without worrying about 100% clogged arteries because the materials producing the food is actually healthy.

I think it's also likely that you'd have niche restaurants where you could get your food prepared by an actual person! You'd also have a lot of experimentation making new food products.

Discuss. ;-)

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Arguably, you wouldn't even need to create new foodstuffs as such, so much as simply really good ones that already exist - who wouldn't love ginormous, succulent lobster tails affordably, or a thick turbot steak?

I'm also wondering what effect that would have on vegetarianism and veganism, if there were no animal origins involved.

And then, of course, there's the effect on farming..

An intriguing question! I may have to pose that in my next entry. ^_^

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Replicators vs 3D printed food.... hmmm. Very good point. While you're based on 3D printing, you're still going to need some farm production to produce the stocks for the printer. And there's LOTS of improvements can be made in that industry, I'll never understand why they don't do crop rotation on a large scale over here, dunno if they do better crop rotation over there.

Thinking about lobster every day for meals: how jaded would you become? Would the suicide rate go up temporarily? And it would definitely make things easier for Jains and such. And how would pricing work? Neil DeGrasse Tyson has a TV show called Star Talk and they had George Takei on and that's what spurred the original thought in me. The economic side is also something to consider: there's no way of knowing how much such a device would cost, nor what the energy costs for operating it would be like.

I think the most interesting thing on the program was NDG talking about interstellar travel and that we'll need pretty much complete control over gravity before it becomes possible. But when we do have control over gravity, I would think that we'd have some sort of unlimited power generation possible which changes so much in society.

I've always thought that replicators required some sort of stock, so maybe they are an evolution of 3D printing. Otherwise, if they're pulling energy out of thin air they're violating thermodynamics.

[silveradept]

According to their technical manuals, the replicators do have a stock that they use to generate new things, which is apparently creatable from breaking down waste products of the crew and possibly the synthesis of organic molecules from collectable elements on the journey.

[silveradept]

I suspect that if we can replicate taste, texture, and smell, then we could build the most decadent-looking meal and give it the appropriate caloric content of a healthy meal, and then generate some truly null-affecting snacks and desserts. Weirdly enough, I'd expect us all to be whatever the standard of healthy is, and rumen a large underground network of people cooking real food.

Considering there's already a successful project underway to replicate animal protein taste and texture from plant material, I don't think we're that far away from the replicator printer for foodstuff.