Taste

The ability to 3D-Print objects is a technology that has been evolving rapidly over the past decade, whilst the concept is not novel and has been around for decades prior, the technology has only really come into its prime in the last 10 years or so.  This is in many respects a lot like the internet in that the ARPANET was first created at the end of the 1960s and existed for decades before the world wide web was created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee which eventually led to the explosion of content and services that now dominate almost every industry. 

When you think of 3D-Printing and what it might one day achieve, the obvious answer to give is that it will one day be able to print objects on an atomic level, able to reconstruct anything atom by atom and therefore possess the ability to essentially take any matter as an input and produce any desired output with minimal waste.  This potential ability to recreate things on an atom by atom basis however poses an interesting question, would your experience be the same each time?  If we take food as an example, if the exact same burger could be produced on demand that was completely identical to the original each and every time, how different would your experience be each time you eat that burger?  Would it be different at all?

The idea that our environment and our current state influences our experience as much if not more than the stimulus in itself is something that has been tested indeed the influence of our senses beyond taste on our enjoyment of a meal has been well documented, this article at Quartz is a good place to start as far as the concept of 'sonic seasoning' is concerned - the use of our sense of hearing to influence our experience. 

The question is, if you wanted to have the same experience each time, in order to recreate that experience, how much effort would be needed and how many conditions would need to be met?  More than this, if all of those things need to be accounted for, how much does the food itself actually influence our experience?  We're often told with varying figures that our body language accounts more for the way people receive what we say than the words themselves, with the typical ratio being that what you say accounts for 10% and how you say it accounts for the remaining 90% so what if our experience of food were to follow the same ratio?  If the food itself only accounted for 10% of our experience and the remaining 90% of the experience was determined by other factors, how would that change our relationship with food?

Food replacement products exist like Soylent, a powder that you combined with water to make a drink that supposedly has everything you need to survive, with the idea being that you drink it instead of eating.  Soylent was named after Soylent Green from Harry Harrison's novel 'Make Room! Make Room!' which depicted a dystopian world.  Part of the opposition to the real life product which fortunately isn't made the same way as the fictional product [I won't spoil it if you haven't read it] is the idea that eating food is generally an experience that has a lot of emotion and sentimentality attached to it.  What we choose to eat is often a reflection of our personality or our socio-economic status.  Foods like caviar are a status symbol, in objective terms they aren't particularly appetising, but their price tag and their rarity is what attaches the status element to these foods, indeed if chicken were as rare as caviar then the price would reflect this and it too would be considered a luxury or a status symbol, this we know from history as food products like sugar which are abundant today and some might say overused were once a luxury and came with a high price tag.

The point I was making is that it is already technically possible and even arguably affordable to live without food and to consume these products instead of eating, most people would not be quick to embrace the idea though, most people that I have seen try these products do so for the novelty out of curiosity more than anything but I have yet to meet someone who actually chose to continue consuming them and give up on food entirely.  Aside from the fact that the long term health implications cannot be known until enough time has passed to accurately gauge their impact, the novelty in and of itself demonstrates that this is at least a concept that people are curious about. 

I would have considered myself someone who was opposed to the idea of giving up food but that is primarily due to the fact that food has played such a major part of my life, beyond the complicated relationship I have with it in regards to my weight, there was even a time when I considered it as a potential career path.  I always had a love of cooking ever since I was a child when I would help Mum whenever she baked and would watch how she made certain foods.  My collection of cookbooks over the years grew with one in particular serving as more of a bible to me than an actual bible.  For a time when considering career paths in high school I considered applying to catering college as a progression path - this was abandoned however when as part of careers education I got to spend time in catering college on placement as well as placement in other industries.  The placement which I have previously mentioned working for a sign writing company piqued more of an interest in computing and technology in industry, food became a hobby something to do in my spare time but not a career choice.  In hindsight I don't know if that was the right choice to make or what the other path might have led to but life is about choices.

When it came to considering careers however one piece of advice we were given was that people will always need to eat, and people will always die, if you pursue either industry and can't make a profit then something is very wrong.  The latter I don't think is in dispute I think immortality is decidedly out of reach for humanity even with technology as advanced as it now is; as for the former however, I am not so sure whether the assertion that people will always eat will hold true - at least not in terms of the conventional definitions of what it means to eat.