Chloé Rutzerveld is the Michael Pollan of 3-D printed food. When materials research group TNO asked the Eindhoven University of Technology graduate to join its project printing food, like chocolate and candy, she declined. “I refuse to work with chocolate and sugar,” she says. “If I were to work for them, I’d use this technology in a good way. I think you should look at actual food.”

Rutzerveld has spent the past year working on Edible Growth. The future-of-food concept involves 3-D printing spherical bits of food using material that acts like tiny baskets for fertilizing seeds, producing two layers of food, grown on the spot. It's a new spin on locally sourced, sustainable food: one that involves very little surplus of uneaten food, and one that gives consumers an up-close, tangible connection to where their food comes from.

It’s still very much in development, but Edible Growth more or less works like this: You print a round structure of an edible dough-like substance (Rutzerveld has been using nylon while prototyping, just to prove the concept), and coat it in a layer of dough that crisps a bit when cooked, like a pastry. The structure acts like an exoskeleton for a dollop of agar-agar, an algae-based jelly that’s like a soil substitute for mushroom or watercress spores. It takes a few days for the spores to sprout, at which point they presumably can be dressed with herbs or spices, and eaten whole.

These bizarre edible gardens are the kind of food inventions you’d expect to see in high-dollar restaurant-laboratories like Noma or Alinea, but Rutzerveld’s sights aren’t set on molecular gastronomy. She’s more interested in addressing health issues and food production in the developing world. Rutzerveld envisions Edible Growth in supermarkets, where on-demand food orders could supply a more immediate, and less wasteful, alternative to the typically resource-heavy food chain. “The spores don’t need to have a lot of storage space,” she says. “It’s like a compact ecosystem.”

Edible Growth has to overcome a handful of obstacles before it’ll be close to market-ready. Printing edible food presents an architectural problem, Rutzerveld says, because the structures need more support than organic matter can typically provide for. Fixing that is a matter of improving both the software and hardware used in 3-D printing. On a larger scale, Edible Growth would require new kinds of infrastructure, like supermarkets that come equipped with 3-D printers and employees trained to use them. Rutzerveld guesses getting the technical aspects right might take around 10 years. Which, incidentally, might be how long it takes the rest of us to start liking agar-agar.