3D printers create edible objects

An engineering lab and a culinary school have teamed up to construct novel edible objects with 3D printers that use pureed foods in place of ink.

Miniature space shuttles made of ground scallops and cheese are among the masterpieces that had already been made using 3D food printers designed by the computational synthesis laboratory at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

The lab is collaborating with the New York City-based French Culinary Institute to make new edible creations through a project called fab@home.

"It lets you do complex geometries with food that you could never do by hand," said Jeffrey Lipton, a researcher and graduate student at the lab.

"So far, we've printed everything from chocolate, cheese and hummus to scallops, turkey, and celery," Lipton told CBC Radio's Spark in an interview that aired Sunday.

Pastes made of different foods are squirted from nozzles inside the box-like printer, which carefully controls their position at all times.

"The process is pretty simple," Lipton said. "Just as ... your 2D printer puts droplets of ink onto a page to create an image, this draws lines of material on top of each other to create a 3D object." ...

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