Lauren Oleksyk isn’t trying to bake the best pizza in the whole world, but she might be responsible for the best slice of a person’s life.

Oleksyk leads a team that's a critical link in the Army's material and supply chain. Its official name is the Food Processing, Engineering & Technology Team, Combat Feeding Directorate. 

While that title is certainly a mouthful, the team's mission is simple: Keep America’s warfighters fed and in peak physical shape under some of the harshest conditions on the planet.
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In a nondescript hotel ballroom last month at the South by Southwest Interactive festival, Andras Forgacs offered a rare glimpse at the sci-fi future of food.

Before an audience of tech-industry types, Forgacs produced a plate of small pink wafers - "steak chips," he called them - and invited people up for a taste. But these were no ordinary snacks: Instead of being harvested from a steer, they had been grown in a laboratory from tiny samples of animal tissue.

One taster's verdict on this Frankenmeat? Not bad, actually.
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Alcohol has been whipped, vaporized, canned into energy drinks and mixed into Jell-O shots. Now, meet powdered alcohol.

A new product called Palcohol will instantly turn water into a Kool-Aid for adults. Just add water to the powdered drink mix for a fast cocktail.

To the surprise of critics, federal regulators have given the powder a thumbs up. The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau approved several flavors this month - including the liquors vodka and rum, and cocktails such as Lemon Drop and Cosmopolitan.

With a package weighing only an ounce, the powdered alcohol is more portable than a bottle or flask of liquor. But critics have taken to Internet blogs to say maybe it's a bit too convenient and potentially dangerous.

Read - Powdered alcohol could be in the mix

Take one big, bad, legendary computer, a social network and a team of adventurous chefs, then mix them up inside a food truck. Serve up the results to a line of curious, hungry festival-goers eager to sample the world’s first man-machine fusion food.

It's called "cognitive cooking" and here is how it works: Twitter users employing the hashtag #ibmfoodtruck and voters on IBM's website pick a familiar dish like kebabs or fish and chips. Then IBM's Watson supercomputer (best known to non-techies for its appearance on the TV show "Jeopardy") creates a long list of eight or more ingredients based upon a chemical analysis of their flavor compounds. Finally, the dish is conceived, prepared and served from a food truck by a team of cooks co-led by Michael Laiskonis and James Briscione of New York City's Institute of Culinary Education.
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