WE'LL PRINT YOUR DRINKS WHILE YOU EAT THE MENU

photo: midnightvelvet59/flickr, creative commons

A glimpse into the future of food with Homaro Cantu, molecular gastronomist and Iron Chef. Evgeny Morozov reports on Cantu's presentation on September 13th at the opening of the Idea Festival in Louisville, Kentucky ...

Homaro Cantu kicks off the festival with a session on "molecular gastronomy"--the collision between science and food that's producing weird and playful dishes in high-end restaurants. Like most gifted people he wears many hats. He is a chef at Chicago’s Moto restaurant, a successful businessman and founder of Cantu Designs, a consultant for government agencies, and a visionary with his own solutions for solving the world’s hunger. Think Einstein meets Bono in a big, gleaming kitchen.

He took the audience on a short tour of his cooking practice, starting with a video of how he cooks his signature 20-course meal, mixed with a few episodes of his performance last year in a popular TV show, "Iron Chef". To describe briefly 20 such dishes can scarcely do them much justice; they need to be seen and eaten. All reveal Cantu’s fascination with science and technology, which is obvious both in terms of how he thinks about food and how he cooks it--with utensils that are not (yet?) kitchen commonplaces, a Class IV laser among them.

Yet Cantu’s most impressive menu item is the menu itself: it’s edible and served dipped in sauce. It's a cousin of the drinks he served on "Iron Chef". He toasted the show while somebody was taking his photo, emptied his glass into what appeared to be a printer, and printed the photograph that had just been taken, using the drink as "ink".

Edible menu? Printable drinks? Thanks to Cantu, we can sample things that sound like ideas from a Ray Bradbury book (Bradbury speaks at Idea Festival on Saturday).

The phrase that Cantu used most often during his presentation was “decentralising food supply”. His worry was that America depended too heavily on outside sources. He argued the urgent need to "decentralise" (I suspect he would do better to say "diversify") where food is produced, and put the whole process into the hands of local food producers. He reckons we’ll see more and more homes with roof-top gardens, and householders who are knowledgeable about producing their own food (unless, that is, we find a way to teleport food or beam it or something).

Cantu’s experiments have earned him attention from NASA and similar players who are looking at ways to “cater” for space travellers. This may sound like a pure publicity stunt, until Cantu starts discussing a printer with 3D capabilities that would be able to “print” food from a set of ingredients. Think in terms of a printer with, say, 10 toners--one for each food element; Cantu calls this gadget “a food replicator”. Those of you wondering about ink for such a printer: Cantu uses organic, food-based inks of his own concoction. He didn’t mention the name of his current printer, but a 2005 article from New York Times had him using a Canon i560 InkJet.

So, how hard would that be to “print” an apple? Already 3D-printers for physical objects are fairly easy to come by, and their price keeps falling (see more about 3D printing here). Cantu seemed sure that soon it would be possible to successfully imprint nutritional value into objects (paper?), so it would be a matter of shipping such materials (they would also often have indefinite shelf life) to wherever they were needed.

Watching Cantu in action, it’s easy to mistake him for a DJ jumping from one turntable to another, or a mad scientist confined to his laboratory. A fan of Salvador Dali (he keeps a photo of the artist in the kitchen), Cantu is a master of deception. His menu boasts barbecued hot-dogs in which the “sausage” is some sort of an ice-cream and the "mustard" is lemon sauce; what looks like charcoal is frozen bread dipped in sauce for serving with BBQ pork. Cantu says his objective is to make sure a diner remembers what he or she ate in the restaurant even ten years later. He is in the “attention deficit disorder dining” business, he says.

The disappointing part is that Cantu doesn’t seem to be too keen on open-sourcing his methods or sharing his revolutionary “let’s feed Africa” ideas with the rest of the world. At least, not for free. he has 16 patents pending, he says. But how many weeks (hours?) would it really take to “unlock” his food replicator, if it ever materialised, given how little time it took to hack the iPhone? For an innovative guy, Cantu seems almost old-school on IP issues. It’s hard to imagine anybody else getting away with such a hungry sense of proprietary ownership. Is food so very different from software?

(For more on molecular gastronomy, see Jon Fasman's article, "Kandinsky in the Kitchen". For more from the Idea Festival see Evgeny Morozov's blog.)