Do you want the skills of a great pastry chef?
I do. Fresh pastries are amazing. A simple luxury that goes a long way to making a snack or desert an experience to remember.
Unfortunately, although I’m pretty good in the kitchen, making great pastries is hard. It takes years of practice to get great. I don’t have that kind of time.
So, it’s great to find Hod Lipson and his team at Cornell using their excellent open source personal fabrication system (fab@home) to automate the preparation of food (and particularly pastries).
The design of fab@home is a little different than most of the other fabrication systems currently available. It uses syringes that allow you to put nearly any type of “goo” (icing, dough, etc.) into the machine that you want to print with. That allows a considerable amount of flexibility in what you can actually create with it.
What’s really interesting, is that the team at Cornell is having some considerable success to date preparing complex foods. For example: adding icing with the precision of the Cake Boss. As a result, it doesn’t appear that this application of the technology is that far away from becoming a solution for professional kitchens around the world (from the perspective of a serial entrepreneur that has turned early tech into big market $$).
In short, this new application of fab@home has the potential to put a professional pastry chef into every home at a very low cost (or DIY).
So why is this important?
It’s not that you can make great pastries when times get tough.
That would be funny, but here’s the actual reason why.
No one person, or even a community, has the time to do all of the things or learn all of the skills required to replace a global production system. This type of technology changes that. It makes it possible to make things locally that used to require a team of experts or a multi-million dollar factory.
Think about that for a moment. It’s important.
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I have thought about that for a moment, and my thoughts are as such:
If we manage to keep muddling through our current situation, and we somehow return to some sort of economic growth and find a way to recycle and reuse every piece of plastic and metal we’ve ever created to mass produce (relatively speaking) these machines (because really, do we WANT to be digging more raw materials out of the ground and destroying our environment?), we’ll get to a point where we don’t need to hire anyone to cook anything, and another skill will be lost. Regardless of what people think, cooking IS a skill, and it is rare amongst people these days (anecdotal, of course).
Of course no one person has the time to learn all the skills required to replace a global production system – there’s no NEED for one person to learn all of them. There are bound to be millions of people available to do create and work in our future communities, and I think we’re bound to require more people with different skills, rather than more technology with one skill.
This technology and its use makes the assumption that our consumption will continue to increase, or at least stay steady. We all know that can’t happen without something terrible happening.
Carl,
Pretty sure this tech doesn’t assume increased consumption. I suspect that with a) extremely customized products and b) products you participate in designing/making = few, higher quality products.
John
Of course, the technology itself doesn’t assume increased consumption, but the users of the technology might assume it if your quality products cause increasing demand over time. I guess I just see people requiring major adjustments in attitude towards consumption first before they’re happy with consuming a high quality product, but in smaller amounts than they’re used to.
Michael Pollen had some good insight on food consumption. It’s basically the classic paradox. If it is too cheap, you eat too much.
I have a question that feels real to me and I hope it won’t sound party poopingly rude. What if civilization collapses far enough that parts become unreplaceable and unfindable and unmakeable for the Cake Boss once it breaks down? Wouldn’t it be good to have and know one’s own personal hands-on Fancy Pastry making skills? Wouldn’t that make one a valuable Resilient Member of a Resilient Community of people trading valued skills with eachother, including cakemaking for all the other community members who want something other than a nasty short brutish life?
Perhaps the Cake Boss can buy the pastry-learner time to learn pastry making after the Cake Boss dies.
I’ll address this tomorrow. It’s a good question.
In a community of any size, there will be someone who loves to make pastries and cakes and bread and so on, and will be good at it.
I dream of a future for people, enough with machines.
One of the great aspects of resilient communities is that it right scales our economic lives. We aren’t all forced into a single broken system. You can approach the solution in different ways.
One way is to focus on a low tech solution. Another uses machines to eliminate tasks you don’t want to do (i.e. washing machines). This site explores many of the different ways to accomplish it.
I’m not sure I want to eat cakes made with a machine, by someone who doesn’t like to make cakes.
Get your hands on some dough some time, knead some bread, it’s not something you’d want to give up to a machine.
Now making a circuit board, that’s a different thing. Craftsmanship has no place in that if it can be handed over to a programmed machine, since once it’s set up right, it doesn’t make mistakes. The old photographic methods of the 1970s are probably what we’ll go back to. I seem to remember a “high tech” way for hobbyists being, ironing what was effectively a t-shirt type iron-on transfer onto the circuit board, touching it up with resist pen, then etching.
I like the idea of taking a blank board, and having a machine that can mill off the unneeded copper coating to make circuit boards, but realistically thinking, point-to-point or “manhattan” construction are more likely to be in our future.
alc,
The point of the article was less about automating food production than about new tools for making local work easier. Point taken on making food by hand.
JR
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