In the movie The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Touchstone Pictures, 2005), it featured one nifty piece of “kitchen appliance” that serves up food of your desire simply by popping your head into a scanning box of sort. This is not it, but what Barcelona-based Nova Meat is doing is no futuristic. Yes. Futuristic… with respect to food. The company has created a 3D-printed ‘steak’. Already, whatever hunger I may have at this point has been suppressed.
3D-printed food could be the future and if that is the case, then all I can say is, this part of the ‘future’ is definitely not what I am looking forward to. Anywho, this steak, while totally edible, is not the fibrous, juicy flesh nature has given us; instead, it is printed using a paste that made up of vegetable-based ingredients like rice, peas, and seaweed. So, yeah. It is a plant-based beefsteak which, in other words, basically means it is a fake meat.
If the images here are the actual product, well, then I am guessing it does not look quite appetizing and I pretty damn sure it is not the steak that you will be asking to be cook ‘rare’. It has an uncanny resemblance to gummy treat. Sorry, it really does look like it. Jokes aside, there’s no denying there are benefits with 3D-printed steak and plant-based food in general. Firstly, there will be no animal slaughter, which addresses the ethical issue, and secondly, since is not real meat, it will be cholesterol-free. Plus, apparently, it will contribute less to greenhouse gas emissions.
Furthermore, a ready-to-cook piece can be turned out much quicker than traditional source of meat as the machine is capable of printing a quarter pound in an hour. While technology is already here to create fake meat, Nova Meat creator, Giuseppe Scionti, aims to replicate the texture, the microscopic morphology, as well as the macroscopic appearance of a fibrous meat, but Scionti did not addresses the question of “how does it taste?”
If this news have you starting to suspect the raw meat you see at your local grocers, well, you don’t have to. At this point, Nova Meat said the company is hoping the plant-based meat products will make it into the market in 3-5 years time.
Images: Giuseppe Scionti.
Source: Digital Trends.
