Inkjet Printed Food (Chicago)

I recently watched a TEDtalks video on the Chicago restaurant Moto, and lo and behold, weird printmaking appeared in the first few minutes. I know this has been around for a while, but the mind still reels at the awesome implications of edible, printed food (using plant-based inks on rice paper). It’s neat that chef Homaro Cantu has actually been answering a lot of nutritional and logistical questions on the TEDtalks video comments quite recently. Here’s a bit of food printing background for the talk:

Homaro Cantu, the chef at Chicago’s Moto restaurant, makes dishes by printing flavored inks onto edible sheets of “paper” [….] Perhaps Cantu’s greatest innovation at Moto is a modified Canon i560 inkjet printer (which he calls the “food replicator” in homage to Star Trek) that prints flavoured images onto edible paper. The print cartridges are filled with food-based “inks”, including juiced carrots, tomatoes and purple potatoes, and the paper tray contains sheets of soybean and potato starch. The printouts are flavoured by dipping them in a powder of dehydrated soy sauce, squash, sugar, vegetables or sour cream, and then they are frozen, baked or fried. The most common printed dish at Moto is the menu.

Makes me long for more printed, edible art like Michael Knierim‘s tongue-in-cheek Crackers.