
NASA grants $125K to create a prototype of a universal food synthesizer - xadxad
http://qz.com/86685/the-audacious-plan-to-end-hunger-with-3-d-printed-food/
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mistercow
I feel like hunger is much more likely to be solved with innovative economic
thinking than with innovative engineering. We should be able to grow enough
food for everyone as it is. That's not really the issue. The issue is getting
the economics worked out so that we _do_ grow enough food, and so that we can
distribute it to everyone who needs it without breaking all of the economies.

~~~
CapitalistCartr
Yes, this! People keep trying to solve a problem they don't understand, that
doesn't really exist. We have enough food in the World to feed our population.
Countries like North Korea, Somalia, Ethiopia, Congo have starvation problems
not from a lack of food in this World but from monsters running their
government that won't allow their people the freedom to live their lives.

In spite of a growing population, farm land in the USA is declining. "In 1990,
there were almost 987 million acres in farms in the U.S., that number was
reduced to just under 943 million acres by 2000, and then reduced to 914
million acres in 2012." <http://www.epa.gov/agriculture/ag101/landuse.html>

~~~
obviouslygreen
Politics aside, there's an appalling amount of food waste in developed
countries. It's certainly not as simple as "send all the not-pretty produce to
Africa" or "ship all the no-longer-perfectly-fresh bread to North Korea," but
there is a huge potential target for reducing what we throw away and getting
it to people who need it.

The major problem, of course, is interfering with people's lifestyles, if only
in marginal ways... we as first-world countries just don't handle having our
convenience messed with very well.

~~~
tomjen3
You just touched all of my buttons wrt food and economics here.

First of all, just because food isn't used doesn't mean it is wasted. I don't
like to go to the store all the time so I buy more food than I may end up
using -- but I still consider it worth it.

Second there is not an limited amount of food in the world and there is no
reason we have to cut down on our use in order to feed hungry Africans -- we
can, as GP correctly pointed out -- feed the entire world.

At this point the only reason there is hunger anywhere in the world is bad
governments and failed states -- Haiti is hell on earth (and has been before
the recent earthquake), but it borders the Dominican republic, which is much
better (if still far from the western world), NK is the worst place on earth
with street urchins scavenging for single kernels of rice in animal dung, SK,
which it borders, is a pretty good place to live and has basically no
starvation.

It is one country today, but the same difference (albit to a lesser degree)
could be seen between East and West Germany.

Finally, take the recent hunger situation in Africa -- people had to walk
miles through the desert, leaving their dead and dying children behind in the
sand because they couldn't carry them. They had to walk until they came out of
Somalia and entered Kenya where they would receive held and food -- because
the warlords of Somalia didn't allow the food aid into the country as they
believed it was a western emperialist attempt to make Islam look bad.

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anonymouz
As others have pointed out, this probably won't be all that useful in solving
the worlds hunger problems.

I'd think the actual motivation for this (and especially for NASA to be
involved) is having a durable, easy to transport yet not completely monotonous
supply of food for long space flights.

This is probably rather long term thinking, so "solving world hunger" is the
typical feel good, not completely untrue yet slightly bullshit line you'd use
to sell this as a good investment to the more short sighted "why are we
spending money on X if there is still hunger/poverty/illness" crowd.

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krapp
I wonder whether the economy involved in manufacturing these cartridges, and
the printers themselves, wouldn't all but guarantee this costs more than the
worlds' poor could ever afford. The article suggests they could buy the
cartridges at a local store ... this assumes, first, the existence of a 'local
grocery store' and, second, that they have enough money to buy the carts (and,
of course, the 0th assumption that there are enough carts to stock the shelves
with.)

If they could do that then, presumably, they could already afford whatever
else was in the store to begin with, and it would end up being cheaper for the
poor who can afford them to just boil the food carts up into soup. I guarantee
a synthetic food cartridge is not going to be cheaper than, say, a sack of
flour or rice and beans or what have you. And if you're requiring a crowd of
people to queue up at the public replicator for their three square meals a
day, you've got a recipe for political disaster on your hands.

Now you could couple this with some kind of government sponsored food program,
so it's "free" I suppose, But what about regions without any real
infrastructure, or stable governance, or even hostile governments?

I'm not dismissing the idea of the printer per se, but I don't see how it
solves world hunger. If NASA wants to revolutionize the quality of life in
poverty-stricken areas of the world, they should focus on improving global
sanitation, water quality, waste disposal, etc.

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DanI-S
If anyone is interested by the edible insects concept touched upon here, check
out our company Tiny Farms (<http://www.tiny-farms.com>). We're one of a
handful of US companies doing real work in this area.

Alongside our research, tooling and outreach work, we've actually managed to
feed Dave McClure a waxworm-filled Baklava: <http://www.tiny-
farms.com/2013/04/tiny-farms-in-zagat/>

~~~
tomjen3
I suppose maybe one day we will see people eating insects as a regular part of
their diet.

But personally insects on food makes me vomit, not salivate.

~~~
MartinCron
I tried to re-frame it as eating arthropods instead of eating insects. We
already eat crabs and lobsters, which are just very large wet bugs.

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m_mueller
The author questions the tastiness of algae - I wonder whether he knows what
Maki rolls are made out of. Ever tried Japanese or Korean seaweed soup? Easily
one of the tastiest soups because of all the Umami flavor in Seaweed.

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ronaldx
Printer ink, being hugely marked-up and inefficiently wasteful, is not a good
analogy for the stated goal:

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/07/04/printer_ink_seven_ti...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/07/04/printer_ink_seven_times_more/)

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contingencies
On the solving world hunger meme, check out 'Permaculture', which could be
reasonably summarized as applying the same type of systematic thinking we
deploy in the computer world to natural systems for the production of food,
energy and other resources. This movement is fairly old (late 60s/early 70s)
but is experiencing a renaissance at present. Coupled with the greater
geographic reach of the internet and the cheaper price of off-grid power
supplies today, it is really something many hackers might enjoy taking a look
at. After all, vast expanses of natural land you can live on and still derive
income (eg. with a long-haul wireless link) are undervalued by the rest of the
population. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture>

Oh, and injecting 'nutrients' is not realistic in the range we require. For a
somewhat loaded example, a typical mushroom has hundreds of organic compounds
that we have no idea about, but are rapidly discovering have great benefit to
us. Fungi and animalia have recently been confirmed in mainstream science to
be the same evolutionary lineage; as such they possess millions of years of
evolution producing great anti-bacterial and anti-cancerous properties; they
can even eat radiation!

------
X4
In 30 Years:

    
    
       Son: Mum, my Food toner is empty!
       Mum: I'm sorry we can't afford a new one, share with your sister!
       Imperator: Let's invent chips for food-toners that force stupid consumers to buy new ones before their toner is actually empty!
       Ministers: Yes, Oh Lord! Can we also throw out a new toner model every quarter that is incompatible to the last one.
       Imperator: I agree my followers! Keep the technology the same, renovating our fabrics is out of question.
       Ministers: Oh great Imperator this is a great idea, we order it to be done by this month.
       Dad: Oh world, why did our Grandads trust the Sci-Fi paroles of the United Companies Associations and didn't see the slavery it brought us coming..
       Grandpa: Dear son, it looked so promising and fascinating when the foundations of this technology were born. We were simply confirmed in our dreams by reality, this feeling was too strong to become aware of it's implications. 
    

I don't want to sound too skeptic, because I actually hope that they invent
the universal replicator, tricorder, warp-drive, universal-translator,
deflectors, AI, Isolinear-Chips, etc. but we all know it is very important
when an invention is born and who is belongs to. Remember E=mc²

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DennisP
That looks like a perfect match for this guy's idea for efficient nutrient
production, presented at Google's Solve For X:
[https://www.solveforx.com/moonshots/efficient-nutrition-
prod...](https://www.solveforx.com/moonshots/efficient-nutrition-production)

He thinks he can provide the protein requirements of the world's population
from an area the size of Rhode Island, cheaper and healthier than agriculture.

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ccallebs
Food sustainability is my passion area. Although the technologist in me thinks
this is an awesome endeavor, the sustainability advocate in me thinks this is
a step in the wrong direction. Agriculture is an area that I think needs to
stay relatively low-tech. However, the cultural boundaries preventing that are
pretty massive.

~~~
zevyoura
Modern agriculture is very, very far from 'low-tech.'

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VLM
I'd like to see a 3-d printed compost-able seed planter that holds the exact
seed, the exact depth, printed with spacing (or attached to a string?) with
printed fertilizer and all that. Shove this stake into the ground for a
perfect "whatever" planting environment.

Doesn't help with floods / droughts / windstorms / frosts but at least it
would remove some planting variables.

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xadxad
A line from the first paragraph says it all:

    
    
      Systems & Materials Research Corporation, just got a six
      month, $125,000 grant from NASA to create a prototype of
      his universal food synthesizer

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dreadheart
"Tea, Earl Grey, Hot"

~~~
jessegavin
Was just about to write the same thing.

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andrewflnr
Someone has to ask: Is there any chance of turning feces into food with this
thing? Obviously it can't supply all our needs, there's a reason we got rid of
it. But for actually helping people with low resources eat, it might cut down
on trips to that "corner grocery store".

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madaxe
Sweet, but ending hunger is incompatible with profit, and this will therefore
die a sad little death as it gets legislated into oblivion, if it gets
anywhere near gaining traction (which it won't, you just know Monsanto and
friends will run a massive PR campaign about how synthesised food is
terrorism, GMO is freedom, etc.).

~~~
tomjen3
Ending hunger is quite likely to lead to a nice profit as dead people don't
buy anything.

The only reason we haven't ended hunger yet is that the poor people are too
poor and have too horrible governments to be able to produce things we value
enough to buy from them.

~~~
madaxe
This isn't the view taken by the worlds agribusinesses - they want enhanced
shareholder value, NOW, not in 30 years time, not in a century. It's utterly
irrational, but the current global stratagem seems to be:

1) Ruin the planet 2) Profit 3) ???

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bokglobule
Soylent green here we come... <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green>

~~~
codeulike
See also: <http://www.soylent.me/> TLDR: Guy is living off a drink he
formulated that provides all his nutritional needs. He's three months in.

