One of the great things about 3D printing is its immediacy. Sure, it still takes a few hours to print even a small object, but it may have taken days or weeks to have that same item commissioned. Yet Chloé Rutzerveld’s concept for a 3D printed snack seems to sacrifice that advantage, because you’re supposed to wait 3 to 5 days after printing before eating it. Why? So the plants and mushrooms inside it can grow.
Chloé’s Edible Growth concept has seeds, spores and yeast embedded in agar, which is housed in a biscuit. If those materials – and the right 3D printers – become readily available as 3D printing ingredients in the future, in theory the snack will make up for the time it takes to be ready to eat with the time it would have taken to grow the plants and fungi in a garden, then harvest and transport them to a bakery to be prepared.
As Chloé says in Dezeen’s interview, she also came up with Edible Growth to show people that 3D printed food won’t just be aesthetically unappealing blobs or paste. In fact, 3D printing could lead to new flavors and combinations of natural ingredients.
The question of course is if people will want to have something that just sits there for days before they can gobble it up. Some people will probably skip the 3D printer and just gorge on the ink.