Students in Doha have developed a printer capable of producing vegetables on a large scale.
PARIS: In the future, the carrot on your plate may have come from a 3D printer! Students in Qatar have come up with an innovative solution to food insecurity.
You may have heard about producing lab-cultivated meat using bovine cells. You may also be familiar with three-dimensional printing, whether for objects or food.
Now researchers have combined the two innovative technologies to develop vegetables, in this case, carrots.
The research project comes from two students at Carnegie Mellon University in Doha, spotted by Al-Jazeera.
Concretely, their work involved developing a printer capable of producing vegetables on a large scale. It’s worth noting that food production using this type of machine yields very limited results in terms of quantity.
In the case of vegetables, for example, purees have to be made to create the “raw material” in the same way that sheets of paper are fed into a traditional printer.
The upshot is that conventional agriculture is still required, even though agricultural crops already take up 38% of global land surface, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
** Click here to read the full-text **
