3D printing isn’t quite there yet…
I am sure a lot of us are familiar with the 3d printing our media shows us. “This 3D printer will be the future of food preparation! It will cut hours of cooking from the modern person’s life!!!” and while these claims may be half true, let me argue some points from the perspective of an owner of a 3D printer.
Fast preparation is usually a bold statement on a lot of 3D printing articles. It may be true that the current dishes being printed on 3d printers take only anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes but if you wanted to go anywhere bigger than gimmick gummy candy and pieces of chocolate expect printing to take much longer. Take this model that I roughly sketched based on some measurements of a pizza I ate a week ago.
I am using a pizza as the measurement because it is one of the foods that actually was 3d printed to date. With current technological standards, this pizza would take around 2 hours just to be made into its raw final form. This would, on one hand, lift the responsibility of the consumer but on the other quadruple the time needed to prepare the product. I know there are a few more arguments like „It could start printing before you got home!“ and „But I have seen videos on youtube where machines print a pizza in like 5 minutes“ and here are the flaws I see with that. The first argument is true. The machine could start printing earlier than you need the food, either by schedule or by an app or something but I see a catch in that idea. The ingredients need to be preserved at least from the morning when you leave for work until the time it starts printing the food for dinner. This means that meat paste used on the pizza would need to somehow be refrigerated. The second argument is pretty simple too. They are using big machinery. The machine is almost as big as your living room and louder than your lawnmower. Consumer grade 3d printers move at a maximum speed of around 250mm/s This estimate brings us to the estimated time from before.
In conclusion please do research. I didn’t mean to seem arrogant but I have run into people recently who believe the future of food is approaching rapidly. This article was purely only to raise awareness about some media outlets just riding the trend. Hope you enjoyed!
I first saw this through an INSIDER video. It's cool, but for me, nothing is better than food made by hand and with love.
Yea I agree :)
Why would anyone 3D print a pizza? Seriously, that's ludicrous. No sane human being would actually do that. Even if we allow for the mechanical assembly of things like scattered ground beef and slices of prosciutto, every 3D printer needs to have a supply of material stock to print from, in a way to move that stock to an actuator.
I don't want to suggest that you've engaged in a strawman argument, but the scarecrow from Wizard of Oz just called me up and complained about you unfairly maligning his people.
It's easy to dispose of a fascile stupid media example – at this point, expecting anyone who works in journalism to understand more than "capital letters come at the beginning of sentences and there's some form of punctuation at the end" is probably asking too much.
Some people hype 3D printing as if it were a magical technology, just in the same way that they hype cryptocurrency as a magical technology, capable of achieving any imaginable wonder – as long as they have no idea how that wonder could be achieved.
Fish in a barrel. Aim higher.
Yes I understand I just needed a bit of a venting from these types of posts :/
What kind of 3d machine that you have?
I have an Anet A8