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. A food-delivery website is parting ways with Facebook in a snarky "breakup" letter. And Facebook, like spurned lovers through the ages, is telling the cheeky startup not to let the door hit it on the way out. Eat24, based in San Bruno, California, lets users enter their address to find restaurants that will deliver to them. They then select a restaurant and order online. The site has more than 70,000 "likes" on Facebook. But last week, it announced it just wasn't that into the social media giant anymore. 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. Because apparently Americans don't have easy enough access to junk food, soon getting a candy bar could be as easy as hitting "print." 3D Systems announced a deal with Hershey's Thursday to collaborate on developing a 3-D printer that makes chocolate and other edible products. |
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