How 3-D Printing Will Change the Way We Eat

Maybe Star Trek's replicators aren't so far away after all.

by Rod D. Martin
January 30, 2015

Aside from creating decorative confections of chocolate and sugar, 3-D printing offers possibilities to help feed everyone exactly to taste and need. Printing food still has far to go to compete with the swiftness of a Star Trek replicator, but the innovations reported by Matt McFarland in The Washington Post could improve life's daily needs beyond the imaginations of sci-fi:

Food that’s easy to swallow, but looks good

For senior citizens with chewing or swallowing problems, they’re often forced to eat foods in puree form.

“Those blobs of puree that they get on a plate don’t look very appetizing and as a result these people which already have problems eating don’t eat enough because it doesn’t look very attractive,” said Kjeld van Bommel, a research scientist at the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research. “They get malnourished in certain cases, which then leads to all sorts of medical conditions.”

Van Bommel and other researchers have beg…