Futuristic Food

Photo courtesy of Stephen Orlick and Homaro Cantu The menu (on the lefthand side) which is printed out from an inkjet printer can be eaten once you're done with it.

The most common printed dish at Moto is the menu. It can literally whet your appetite by providing a taste test of what's on the menu: tear off and eat a picture of a cow and it will taste like filet mignon. Once you are done with your sampling, the menu can be torn up and thrown into a bowl of soup - but only once you've ordered your two-dimensional sushi which consists of photos of maki rolls sprinkled on the back with soy and seaweed flavouring.

Cantu will not divulge what he did to the printheads to have them print in vegetable juice, nor the exact ingredients in his colourful inks. But he does have plans for using this printing technology beyond Moto and has already started to publicise it to advertisers. Soon you could be flicking through a magazine and eating an advert for a pizza delivery company.

Creative cooking

Aside from using printers, Cantu is developing new ways of cooking food. He plans to buy a class IV laser, the type normally used in surgery or welding, to create "inside-out" food. By using the laser to burn a hole through a piece of meat, steaks will be seared in the centre and be more rare towards the edges. Bread can also be "baked" in this way, with crusts in the middle and soft dough outside.

But in addition to preparing food in unconventional ways, Cantu is thinking of innovative ways to make a trip to the restaurant a different experience. He takes his inspiration from experience design, which involves creating something with the process, rather than only the product, in mind. It concerns involving the "users" in the entire life cycle - for example having the food experience start from the time a person enters the restaurant until they take their last bite. Cantu is also focussed on combining purpose with aesthetics and tries to understand what makes other media successful. Perhaps what people enjoy from the theatre or using a web site can be incorporated into the experience of eating out.