The future of food: anyone for a 3D-printed pizza?

Freaky fruit

Whether you like or loathe the idea of genetically modified fruit and veg, the creator of a new purple tomato hopes they’ll be in the shops in a few years. In Norwich, Professor Cathie Martin moved a gene from a snapdragon to a tomato to up its levels of anthocyanins — antioxidants that may also be anti-inflammatory. If you can’t wait for this tomato, try Black Brandywine, a newly popular, non-GM heirloom variety. Or grow the new TomTago, which produces tomatoes above ground and potatoes below (thompson-morgan.com). If you just want to eat mind-bending fruit, try a pluot (a plum/apricot cross) from Sainsbury’s, a tangelo (pomelo/tangerine) from Tesco or a pineberry (a pineapple-flavoured white strawberry) from Waitrose. All were created as hybrids, and have nothing to do with GM.

Print your own dinner

Last year a café in Tokyo debuted a unique Valentine’s gift — a 3D print-out of a customer’s head, made of chocolate. (How very Marc Quinn.) At last month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, 3D Systems debuted its two 3D sweet printers, the ChefJet and ChefJet Pro, which come out later this year. You can already get your own from ChocEdge.com for £3,465 in time for Valentine’s Day. Meanwhile, NASA is funding research into printable pizzas for astronauts, and Italian firm Barilla has teamed up with Dutch researchers TNO to create printable pasta. Later this year Natural Machines hopes to start selling its Foodini 3D food printer, which pipes out fresh food in programmable shapes (including fish, chips and peas, below), ready to cook. Co-founder Lynette Kucsma explains: ‘The consumer prepares and places their own ingredients in Foodini, [but] in addition, we are looking at pre-packaged food capsules made freshly in stores. Imagine picking up a five-capsule pack of ravioli ingredients, going home and popping them into Foodini to print.’ Imagine!

Appy shoppers

Fearful that nobody will get to see your perfect tomato, quail and lemongrass salad? Cookbooth is an app that allows you to create your own photographed and annotated recipes to share with other users — a kind of ‘Boastagram’ for foodies. Then, if you get stuck in the supermarket booze aisle, baffled by choice, try the new Wotwine app to check bottle reviews before you buy. Ottolenghi’s new app (right) even lets you turn recipe pages without your sticky fingers touching the screen — you just wave your floury palms and over those pages go.

Local folk

If you’d like to avoid supermarkets, but can’t find time to visit 15 different websites for your weekly shop, tech can help you solve that. Ben Patten runs FarmDrop (farmdrop.co.uk), a new platform launching in mid-March that allows people to buy direct from local producers (such as Jacob Sykes and Nick Ball of Fosse Meadow, above) — much like a weekly veg box, but also including most of the food you can get in a supermarket. He was inspired by the success of Airbnb and is keen to get small food producers — and shoppers — to understand the value of embracing new technology, removing the middlemen. ‘The many passionate and brilliant individuals working towards more sustainable food production and consumption may not have always seen tech as a natural ally. We aim to totally change that. I think the corporate types, as in all sectors, struggle to innovate. They don’t want to challenge their business model.’ Patten sees this as the perfect moment for food companies to get involved. ‘Small businesses can access technology at a fraction of past costs. Providers of software can sell great technology for very little, because they have so many buyers.’

Insta-mallows

For a vainglorious love token, head to boomf.com, where you can get your most sickeningly posed Instagram selfie printed on to marshmallows (right). For £12 you can get nine marshmallows (this year’s hottest sweet treat), with nine different pictures printed on them. It’s made rather glamorous by the fact that the Duchess of Cambridge’s brother, James Middleton, is — quietly — the brains behind the whole thing. Donna Air’s sure to have a sticky V-Day this year.

Texting fridges, Touchscreen hobs

LG announced in January that it is developing HomeChat, a way for us to instruct our appliances from afar. Soon you’ll be able to ask your oven for a recipe recommendation, or ask your fridge if you need to buy milk. Whirlpool is working on a touchscreen stovetop (above), with induction hobs and a screen displaying your recipe, plus Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter. Entrants in the latest Electrolux Design Lab competition plan to bring holographic tutorial-giving chefs and bacteria-sensitive digital knives to our homes. And if all goes well with current crowdfunding, TellSpec will be on the market by August — it’s a chip spectrometer-based food scanner, linked to your smartphone, which can tell you exactly what’s in your meal, including calories, chemicals and allergens, developed by the mother of a severely allergic little girl. Now that’s brain food for thought.

Virtual reality restaurants

A startup called One Minute London provides one-minute video previews of restaurants. ‘The idea came about after spending several evenings at dismal restaurants as a result of having only marketing fluff, reviews with questionable credibility and empty venue pictures to go by,’ explains founder Nelson Sivalingam. ‘It’s like watching a movie trailer and deciding whether you want to watch the film or not.’ (Also, check out 60secondreviews.com.) Of course, you can’t taste the food via your computer, so until they invent lickable screens, trying a place out is the only way to know if it’s really any good.

Aquaponic boom

Tech is also helping small producers: GrowUp (growup.org.uk) sells salad and tilapia fish (below) grown aquaponically in an upcycled shipping container within sight of the Shard. Aquaponics is an environmentally friendly closed loop system: the fish generate waste, which is used as fertiliser for the plants; the plants clean the water that the fish are kept in. A year ago, founders Kate Hofman and Tom Webster worked in office jobs and wished they were doing something greener — GrowUp was the result. You can eat their goodies at Elliot’s Café in Borough Market and at eco-chef Arthur Potts Dawson’s occasional pop-ups.

Drink three meals a day

Anyone who loves eating will be baffled by the attraction of meal replacements, but last year the Soylent shake concept found enough backers to raise £1.5 million for development. (The name comes from a 1966 sci-fi book about overpopulation, rather than the much weirder 1973 film Soylent Green about a food-scarce New York and some cannibalism. Possibly not the best choice of brand name either way.) It’s not exactly a futuristic meal in pill form, but nearly — it’s one shake, made from a powdered food substitute, designed to meet all your nutritional needs with no hassle (or joy). For those of us who like a bit more variety, over the next decade we can expect to start eating insects — you get more meat out of them for the amount of energy you put in, they’re much better for both the environment and for us, and they actively enjoy the kind of high density that would make Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall weep if they were chickens. They will appear in processed sausage form like pepperoni, as pâté and even milled like flour to go in protein bars.