Food Additive Manufacturing: A Systems Approach

With four bases, everyone knows the complex, differentiating potential of DNA. But with carbohydrates, proteins, lipids and a little water, we've long been able to manufacture food in liquid, solid or pasty form. Smaller quantities of other elements are needed to take these basic constituents beyond their purely nutritive or caloric role. These are elements that will give food other performances, in particular taste, making the act of eating part of an important social process, particularly in France. To achieve this objective, various methods of food production have been developed, from cooking to molecular cuisine (see articles [F 1 015] and [F 1 016] in agri-food).

Additive manufacturing (or 3D printing) has been around since 1984, and for the past few decades has been focused on using the concept to produce food. Additive manufacturing is based on the principle of localized transformation of matter: the minimal element used to describe this transformation (liquid/solid; powder/solid; etc.) is, by analogy with the pixel, called a voxel. Once a surface has been transformed, a new layer, contiguous with the previous one, is transformed again, and so on. This widely industrialized principle is not called into question in this article; it's the way it's opened up to this recent field, in particular by drawing on what constitutes the elements of human nutrition, the needs of the population, its desires, with a study of the complex relationships between achieving a performance objective (food, pleasure, surprise, etc.) and the additive manufacturing process that we deal with here.

3D food printing offers the possibility of selectively depositing nutrients in space, grading their composition to produce complex structures with desired texture, taste and morphology in a controlled manner. Manipulating microstructures by regulating the mixing and selective deposition of food materials can regulate the mechanisms of fracture, degradation or dissolution during use of the bio-construct, giving the potential to produce a range of functional and novel foods.

Beyond the purely technological action concerning additive manufacturing processes applicable to the theme, the compromise between...