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

[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.