Patxi Larumbe was watching Star Trek one day when Spock beamed from the bridge of the Enterprise down to a hostile red planet. There was a Vulcan logic to the idea it spawned. “I just thought to myself, we can do that with a T-bone steak,” he said.
The Spaniard gathered a group of mathematicians, engineers and robot scientists to an industrial park on the outskirts of Pamplona and instructed them to make his vision a reality. Today they have, creating food from thin air with an invention that Larumbe hopes could one day be a solution to global hunger.
If Heston Blumenthal is a molecular gastronomist, Larumbe goes even further, taking meals from petri dish to plate, building the first 3D printers capable of producing meat of extraordinary authenticity. It is almost impossible to tell the difference.
To create a steak, for example, the process begins with offcuts discarded by butchers during the slaughtering process. These are “reverse-engineered” into marbled premium cuts. The cuts are treated much like a patient in a hospital, put into a computed tomography (CT) scan that reveals intricate fat, meat, bone and vascular pathways.
Once this data has been extracted, the 3D printer is fed with offcuts and undisclosed additives, which it reassembles into the designed cutlet. “Food to data and data to food” is the patented process. And while the end result loses next to nothing in appearance, taste and texture, these steaks are healthier because they have Omega 3 fatty acids added during their creation.
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“We are a bunch of geeks and freaks who would never have been employed by a traditional food producer, yet I firmly believe that we are going to solve many of the world’s food problems — it’s a massive protein problem,” he says.
When The Times visits, Larumbe offers a sample of shoulder from the prized Iberian black pig that the Spanish call presa. The same printing process has been followed as for the steak, resulting in a taste experience that is barely distinguishable from the real thing.
Aside from reducing waste and creating a healthier product, Larumbe and his team have already taken two vegan products to market: bacon and foie gras, both of which are made from 100 per cent vegetable products, although you wouldn’t know that unless they told you.
The plant-based bacon sizzles and wrinkles, giving off a reassuringly salty fragrance. Both products have gone on sale in Spanish supermarkets. While the meats won’t reach the retail market for another year, an investment by the US food giant Cargill points to global interest.
The Times is offered another line that is in development at present: tuna flakes that would not shame a salad, pizza or sandwich. Octopus, which is hugely popular in Spain and increasingly rare, and salmon and tuna steaks will also be flopping out of its 3D printers soon.
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Judging by this taste test, the case for appetising printed food seems unimpeachable and the economic case is on the horizon. Larumbe’s 3D bacon printer can produce in a minute what it would take six months for a pig farm to come up with.
Larumbe said: “It isn’t possible to continue breeding animals for turning into meat on the scale that, for example, is needed to feed a billion Chinese.”
