What Are You Printing for Dinner?

IN THE OFFICE OF HIS MANHATTAN catering kitchen, Peter Callahan watched intently as I ate a small chicken drumstick off a 3-D printed plastic “bone.” He had one question: “Would you love it more if you could eat the skewer?”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/what-are-yo ... 1465485827

A couple years ago an entrepreneur/social media maven I follow invested in a Spanish company gunning to make a home-version 3D food printer. This guy was raving on Facebook about how exciting it was to be able to make "healthy" versions of chicken nuggets, crackers, etc. He was getting a lot of pushback from people online and it finally dawned on me: This guy doesn't cook "real" food at home, he reheats frozen stuff. He doesn't get why so many of us didn't see the appeal of the food printer, because those of us responding actually enjoy cooking from scratch. (And I suspect he wouldn't have been particularly excited once one arrived in his kitchen and he discovered he needed to cook as a precursor to printing.)

Making home printed chicken nuggets doesn't sound particularly appetizing, and is even less appealing when I think of all the steps I'd have to go through before putting the pureed cooked chicken into the printer. As someone who loves cooking, the only thing I could possibly imagine using a food printer for would be things where a design is part of the novelty -- chocolate poured into in particular shapes, for example. Or maybe something where a puree needed to be a very consistent thickness, or I wanted very uniform cookies. But there are easier ways to get that consistency than a food printer that costs hundreds of dollars.