Share your Nana’s best tip or recipe for reducing food waste to be in the running to win a beautiful day of pampering, styling and photo shoot with the two of you! Click here to enter: https://a.pgtb.me/SqB1fl Imagine if you could load fresh, seasonal and organic ingredients into a 3-D printer and then have it print a master-chef worthy oven-ready dish? Would you do it? Well a group of women from a startup called Natural Machines are mastering the art of printing food; the company's 3-D food printer known as ' Foodini ' is scheduled to hit the market in early 2015. The Foodini prints food into shapes, just like industrial 3-D printers that make custom parts for jets and prototypes for toys. So why print food you might ask? Well it's all to do with fighting prepackaged and processed foods crammed with chemicals and preservatives. Co-founder Lynette Kucsma says "Too many people eat unhealthy, pre-processed foods or packaged meals, because they don’t have enough time or skills to make homemade foods from scratch. By 3-D printing food, you can automate some of the most labor-intensive steps, making it easier to create fresh and healthy meals." You could 3-D print foods like homemade pastas, veggie burgers, quiches & crackers in your kitchen without complicated steps and a lot less mess, using fresh ingredients you source yourself. Combining this with shopping practices like buying local, seasonal and organic produce, it could be revolutionary for a lot of households. Obviously, preparing food from scratch using quality and sustainable ingredients will always be the best option, but it's true there are many problems with how developed societies feed themselves, and restrictive time pressures are often the reason people resort to unhealthy, over-packaged fast foods which have an enormous negative environmental impact. There is a lot of skepticism around food printing on the quality of the food, but as Kucsma says "It’s not a magic machine, so you must put good-tasting, fresh ingredients in to get good-tasting food out." If the Foodini takes off, it really could change the way many eat, and we would hope they will really push this fact that the food is only as good as the ingredients you put in and link it to fresh, seasonal, local and organic produce.
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Here is a short video about the Foodini: