Have you ever walked up to a bakery window, looked at the samples and thought, those look a little like shiny plastic toys? Welcome to the world of fake food and the problem 3D printers is solving with exact replicas that are so like the original, you might not be able to tell the difference.
From space to the medical industry, these replicators have advanced to produce surgical tools, prosthetics, habitable lunar bases and food we actually eat. Now artists are taking advantage of the enhanced technology to print fake food for window displays, movie sets, photo shoots and more.
And it looks good enough to eat.
3D-printed fake food is an entire industry dedicated to mimicking the food we eat every day. Dubai-based FoodArtConcept by Caro works closely with restaurants, chocolatiers, museums and entertainment sets to ensure the presentation is as exact a match as possible. But it’s not as simple as asking the printer for something and out it pops.
There’s a lot more involved, and the process goes a little like this:
Typically, clients provide high-resolution images of the desired product outcome and overall impression they wish to convey with the artwork. From these images, a software program creates a rendering, or 3D digital model, of what the finished product will look like.
The raw material used for printing, typically composed of white or colored filaments, is fed into the 3D printer. FoodArtConcept uses Digital Light Processing 3D printing.
Digital Light Processing 3D printing is a type of stereolithography technology that uses light to solidify a photosensitive polymer (or plastic that melts instead of burns when heated) called a photopolymer.
CAPTION: 3D printed food display IMAGE: Courtesy of FoodArtConcept
The photopolymers react to ultraviolet (UV) light through a chemical reaction called photopolymerization. A digital light projector shines UV light in the shape of each layer of the 3D object onto the photopolymer resin, causing the resin to harden in those areas. This process is repeated layer by layer until the object is completed.
The process, originally developed in 1987, is popular because of its high printing speed. These printers create detailed and meticulous 3D prints, and because they are able to cure entire layers at once, they’re the faster choice — a clear benefit when you rely on them for business purposes.
IMAGE: Caroline Ismail, founder and managing director-FoodArtConcept
“The outcome is a plastic-shaped food, white or pre-colored (depending on the added filament). If white, it will be hand-painted to match as much as possible the food color,” says Caroline Ismail, food consultant and founder of FoodArtConcept.
Ismail started FoodArtConcept over nine years ago and serves clients all over the Middle East. She is also a doctoral researcher at College de Paris-Ascencia Business School in the UAE. Her research is focused on obesity and its relationship to socio-economic, cultural, consumer and federal influences.
The main obstacle Ismail faces is pushback on product cost. She says that businesses can create mouth-watering displays to draw in more business. Movie sets can save money and reduce food waste on sets.
Caption: Display at Qasr Al Hosn Museum, Abu Dhabi IMAGE: Courtesy of FoodArtConcept
And ultimately, the return on investment over time can be worth it now that near exact replicas can be color matched, textured and painted to mimic the real thing.
“I always ask my clients to look at the profit and loss when needing to display a fresh croissant or ice cream every day,” says Ismail, who is also a food stylist who ensures brand continuity with not only individual pieces of food but entire displays.
“The final stage is done manually. Let’s take the example of a date basket or a bowl of nuts. Food styling for photography or filming purposes, the process entails ensuring each layer can be distinguished by the end consumer.
For 3D printing, the extra element is glue, ensuring each piece is displayed realistically and offers a long-lasting shelf life,” she says.
Some of FoodArtConcept’s clients include Subway, Godiva, Haagen-Dazs and the Qasr al Hosn museum in Abu Dhabi.
So be careful the next time you spot a piece of fruit or cake that looks too good to pass up, because if you choose to indulge, you might just break a tooth.
“Milk, it does a body good” is a vintage 1980s advertising slogan used to emphasize the health benefits of cow’s milk on the human body. Milk is still packed with loads of nutritional value required for optimal health, but the next time your palate craves an icy, cold glass of refreshing milk, consider a shift in sourcing from animals in green pastures to those wandering the dunes.
According to Home Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, milk offers 48 percent of the protein and 9 percent of the calories a child of 5 to 6 years with light physical activity needs. Cow’s milk is packed with 13 essential vitamins and nutrients like calcium and vitamins A and D that contribute to a healthy diet.
But the impact of the dairy industry on the environment and the subsequent impact of the environment on dairy farms has farmers shifting to camel-milk production to meet demand and their environmental commitments.
It seems camel milk can provide the health benefits of cow’s milk and then some with the bonus of a much lower carbon hoofprint.
THE ENVIRONMENT TAKES THE HIT
With 270 million dairy cows producing milk along with 2.1 gigatons of carbon dioxide every year, the dairy industry is responsible for 30 percent of all anthropogenic emissions. The environmental impact is ample, and with dairy product demand expected to triple by 2050 due to population growth and increased consumption, it is primed to worsen.
Primarily, methane emissions are a ruminant’s worst offender. Methane is produced in the digestive process and expelled into the atmosphere through cows belching, accounting for 20 percent of total global emissions. What’s worse: It’s 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
IMAGE: Unsplash
To be fair, all livestock emit their fair share of methane but pound for pound, camels are the eco-friendlier option.
Emissions aren’t the only environmental issue with dairy farming — there’s also land use to grow feed, pesticides for those crops, and all the water required to get milk from cow to shelf.
WHAT-ER?
The average water volume used to produce 1 liter of milk, including to grow the livestock feed, is 911 liters. This will differ between farms but it’s a big ratio, and when water supplies are also threatened, the cost could escalate.
Water pollution due to manure mismanagement can also impact surrounding water supplies. Overflowing and cracking manure vats sometimes cause seepage and, subsequently, groundwater contamination. This makes its way over time to all manner of bodies of water including rivers and oceans.
IMAGE: Unsplash
Camels, however, require significantly less water and can go two weeks without any, compared with two days for a cow. With a high threshold for extreme conditions, and the ability to lose 30 percent of their body weight and still survive, camels emerge as a definitively more resilient choice as global temperatures rise and food security becomes a pressing concern.
Food security is also impacted by the abundant land mass required to meet the nutrition needs of grazing animals and the pastures for grazing. This leads to not only extensive deforestation but the knock-on effects of further emissions and impacts on biodiversity and ecosystems.
Whereas camels can eat almost any plant that grows where they live. Their long necks also mean they can reach higher for trees and will happily snack on shrubs, grass or even thorny plants.
Camel milk sounds like the clear winner when it comes to nutrition and sustainability, but it’s not easy to transition a massive industry. Dairy farms have been around for generations and in many cases are still family businesses. Plus, in places rich with grasslands and more temperate weather, cow farms still make sense. But when it’s more a matter of survival than that of public buy-in, people find a way.
FARMS IN AMERICA ARE LEADING THE CHARGE HERE
Historically, cows have been an essential part of many African economies, diets and traditions but heading into what could be another year of drought, the Horn of Africa and surrounding areas are in a state of emergency. A three-year drought that began in 2020 resulted in crop destruction, loss of grazeable land, livestock depletion and dried-up water sources.
Camel milk offers a lot of benefits, but the key is a stable market.
– James Salfer, dairy educator-University of Minnesota Extension
In Samburu, a Kenyan county with a population of almost 310,000, people were struggling with malnutrition as most of their cattle perished.
Cattle farmers noticed neighboring villages with camel farms struggled very little, however.
The government had started a camel program offering one camel to each person eight years prior. So far, 4,000 camels have been gifted. Other African countries are also seeing their camel populations grown.
CAMELS TRAVEL TO AMERICA
Camel farms are not limited to sub-Saharan African countries — they’re also gaining popularity in the United States.
A 35-acre family farm in Nebraska called Camelot Camel Dairy offers camel milk to consumers who struggle with milk allergies or who just might be curious and somewhat adventurous. They are one of only two licensed camel-milk providers in the country and are hopeful that with demand, the price of a liter of milk, currently U.S.$16, will eventually become affordable and accessible.
“Camel milk offers a lot of benefits, but the key is a stable market. Farmers need assurance of demand, and consumers must be willing to pay the price of what it costs to raise and milk camels,” says James Salfer, a University of Minnesota Extension dairy educator.
The global camel-milk trade could exceed U.S.$13 billion by the end of the decade, up from $1.3 billion in 2022.
The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. Prior to that, Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were a couple of computer science doctoral candidates at Stanford University.
Take two theses, one algorithm, an initial prototype that used nearly half of Stanford’s entire network bandwidth, and a patent citing another patent that turned into the Chinese search engine Baidu, and you’ve got Google, a trillion dollar tech company.
LISTEN TO THE DEEP DIVE
And it all started with a university research project.
The university research community has always been under outside pressure — political, economic and institutional — that has had the potential to impact, for better or worse, the nature and direction of academic research. In recent years, a new type of pressure has descended on university-based research: increased emphasis on the commercialization of research.
Commercialization is the process by which a product or service is introduced to the market. It is the entrepreneurial push that translates research discoveries and new technologies from laboratory to market. Universities around the world offer incubation and accelerator programs and assistance to commercialize the research conducted in their facilities.
This makes sense: Research that can be used to solve pressing problems or improve quality of life are most impactful when in the hands of those who can benefit from them. To reach these people, research needs to hit the market. Additionally, taking innovations to market also provides an economic benefit. Whether it be through licensing technology to other companies or developing startups, commercialization provides new revenue streams.
A CRUCIAL ROLE
“Universities play a crucial role in society as producers and transmitters of knowledge,” says Parimal Patel, University of Sussex. “In recent years, the discussion about whether universities can encompass a third mission of economic development, in addition to research and teaching, has received greater attention. Many have argued that within the remit of the third mission, university-industry research collaborations are extremely important mechanisms for generating technological spillovers. At the same time, many governments have introduced an increasing range of policies encouraging the involvement of universities in technology transfer.”
Things have not always been so. Licensing of inventions by academics became prevalent only in the early 20th century: In 1908, Frederick Cottrell received a patent to reduce industrial pollution, and in 1925, the University of Wisconsin-Madison founded its technology-transfer office to disseminate Harry Steenbock’s discovery that irradiating food to increase vitamin D could treat rickets.
Quaker Oats requested that technology, and the office licensed it in 1927.
IMAGE: Abjad Design
The UK established the National Research Development Corporation in 1948, leading to the first hovercraft in the 1950s, but it took until 1985 for an increase in academic entrepreneurship to appear.
Things changed in the US with the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act. Formerly known as the Patent and Trademark Act Amendments, the Bayh-Dole Act created a uniform patent policy among the federal agencies that fund research, motivating more and more universities to become actively involved in the transfer of technology from lab to market. In the US in 2018, approximately USD$2.94 billion in licensing revenue was generated directly from technology transfer.
Now, there’s another push.
THE ARAB WORLD ENTERS THE CHAT
Sami Bashir, director of Khalifa University’s technology management and innovation office, says it is increasingly evident that universities in the Middle East want to make their mark in the world of research and development through sponsored research and technology transfer.
“In recent years, there has been a great emphasis in the Arab world for universities to incorporate an ‘economic development mission’ within their strategic vision and operation so as to contribute towards their local and regional economies,” Bashir says. “Innovation and entrepreneurship have become cornerstones for the vision of new economies in this region. Universities are viewed as promising outlets that not only provide scientific discoveries, but can also create business opportunities in the form of technology-based startups.”
DWINDLING RESOURCES
Bashir says he believes the drive for economic benefits from scientific research stems from the global economic downturn and the drop in oil prices. He says most Arab countries have relied on natural resources, such as oil and minerals, to support their economies, but these resources face scarcity and environmental challenges that would slow or hinder their economies in the near- and long-term. Accordingly, he says, research and education funding has increased in most Arab countries.
“Technology patenting and commercialization has increasingly led to significant advances in cutting-edge research, focusing primarily on innovations in life sciences, information technology, and software and data management,” Bashir says. “Unfortunately, the existing regulatory framework does not suit development of new technologies, nor the creation of technology-based startups, but this is changing. Additionally, universities are steadily being regarded as more relevant to the technology marketplace and easy to do business with. As a result, more universities have begun to create formal research-administration or technology-transfer offices to support translation of business ideas into viable technology products or processes.”
NOT EVERYONE IS A FAN, THOUGH
Ubaka Ogbogu, associate professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Alberta, Canada, says the increasing push to commercialize university research has emerged as a significant science-policy challenge, with socio-economic benefits but also potential risks that are not as often considered.
IMAGE: Abjad Design
“Studies of research-policy trends suggest that the commercialization ethos and associated pressures are unlikely to relent anytime soon and may, in fact, become the central or defining mission of university-based research,” Ugbogu said. “These studies also show that the push to commercialize is almost always presented as an unqualified social good that warrants broad governmental and institutional focus and support. Conversely, its risks and challenges are largely absent from policy statements and discussions.
A 2014 Pew Research Center survey of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science found that 47 percent believed the pressure to develop marketable products was having an undue influence on the direction of their research, while 69 percent viewed a focus on projects expected to yield rapid results as having a similar influence.
Hyun Ju Jung and Jeongsik Lee, both at the Georgia Institute of Technology, reviewed nanotechnology patents filed between 1996 and 2007 in a study conducted in 2014, finding that the “government-initiated emphasis on commercialization” of US university research “may undermine open paths towards novel technologies and hinder explorations of unknown fields.”
NARROWING RESEARCH SCOPE
The government-initiated emphasis in this case came in the form of the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), a US government science and technology program launched in 2000. Jung and Lee consider the NNI a policy intervention that targeted the commercialization of technology with a focused research direction to promote national economic growth. They found that once the NNI was implemented, US universities have benefited from increased interest — and funding — from industry but have narrowed down their research scope. This ultimately reduces their discovery of potential novel technologies, meaning they are less likely to generate technological breakthroughs — which “appear[s] to be inconsistent with the NNI’s objectives,” as the authors say.
Nanotechnology may be a narrow area to focus on, but these findings do suggest that a focus on commercialization forces a narrow focus for research.
Ogbogu was hardly surprised: “Several studies have found associations between commercialization activity and data withholding, the erosion of collaborative research relationships, and an unwillingness or reluctance to engage in certain research trends, such as open science initiatives, which conflict with the financial considerations that underlie the pursuit of commercialization.”
A POSITIVE IMPACT THROUGH KNOWLEDGE
One important aspect of knowledge sharing is the capacity to move research results from the laboratory into new or improved products and services in the marketplace. Commercialization of research is an important part of how science makes it to the public, which Ogbogu acknowledges. “It is a primary means through which medical products and services reach the market and consumers, which can, in turn, advance public health.”
He’s not wrong: A study by Boston University found 153 drugs and vaccines were developed by public research institutions between 1981 and 2011. The Covid-19 mRNA vaccine originated from research at a University of Pennsylvania bench.
Consider also, that sharing knowledge from a university in an open-access manner would result in another company springing up to profit from its usage. If a company will exist or a license could be issued anyway, why shouldn’t a university benefit directly?
This is where the publish-versus-patent argument comes in.
PUBLISHING DILEMA
In most jurisdictions, a patent cannot be obtained if an invention was previously known or used by other people in the US. Understandable, but publishing results counts as making an invention known. To be awarded a patent, you have to file your application before you publish, speak about or present your work.
In a publish-or-perish world, however, researchers can hardly afford to not publish papers, present at meetings or discuss their work.
Gangotri Dey works in Cornell University’s technology-transfer office, focusing on the physical sciences. She recognizes that the main goal of most of the university’s inventors is to publish their work in peer-reviewed journals but highlights that this differs between colleges: “A newly appointed assistant professor in the chemistry department is more eager to publish, whereas a person from an engineering college will likely think of patenting their invention before it is sent out for publication.”
IMAGE: Abjad Design
In Dey’s experience, of the academics that do file and secure a patent, less than 10 percent are licensed to companies, with life sciences and the medical school securing the most funding. The physical science division brings in less than 10 percent of the total revenue, showing that market success also tends to be field-specific and university goal-oriented. The other issue is the timeline.
“A typical patent takes about four years to be issued,” says Dey. “This varies and some fields are so heavily backlogged it may take ten years to get a patent. I assume there is no peer-review journal article that takes this long! My biggest concern though is that we are comparing apples to oranges in this scenario. A peer-reviewed journal article should be for the basic science that needs to be communicated to the public that is paying for this research with their taxes. A patent is filed to benefit the public from a ready product. You can win a Nobel Prize for an invention, but you might not be able to patent that same invention. In my view, you can’t compare the two.”
So is it possible to have the best of both worlds? At the Khalifa University technology-transfer office, Bashir says with a laugh: “That’s where we come in!”
Time to visit your local TTO, folks.
THE SHIFT TO STARTUPS
In recent years, there has been a paradigmatic shift toward commercializing technology through startups, rather than patents. University inventions tend to need substantial development before they are ready to go to market, and universities are now trending toward funding these startups. Potential is evident: Stanford University alone birthed Google and HP.
Thomas Astebro, professor of entrepreneurship at HEC Paris, says the dramatic increase in the rate of university spinoffs can be attributed to the germination of biomedical research in the 1970s; the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980; increased financing of research by industry; changes in university guidelines and behavior; and changes in the scientific ethos of faculty and researchers.
Creating companies takes extensive work, expertise and focus, and academic institutions are not historically designed or optimized for this. Those that can shift focus quickly and create and support startup companies built around innovations designed within their walls can increase the likelihood that those innovations make an impact. Just as university research creates many innovations, universities can also participate in the startup-creation process in many ways.
LOCAL CHALLENGES
“We can and should learn from the experiences of universities in the US and Europe, but the adoption of impactful technology-transfer models in the Arab world must be established through our own learning and experiences in ever-changing operating environments,” Bashir says. He says he believes universities in the Arab region experience challenges that can be categorized as internal and external, with the most pressing being the adoption of intellectual-property policies.
Among internal challenges, most universities seem to lack policies and guidelines that clarify the rights of researchers whose discoveries are commercialized. The lack of such policies renders researchers more apprehensive in disclosing inventions to their universities or technology-transfer offices, Bashir says, which in turn reduces the chance of research commercialization.
Additionally, universities in the Middle East have been traditionally viewed as beit al hikma, or “houses of wisdom” — entities that provide academic scholarly activities, not industry-relevant applied research and development.
Establishing progressive external industry partnerships will be essential for attracting industry funds to university research activities and enhancing the delivery of research results to market.
IMAGE: Abjad Design
“The biggest challenge is we mostly deal with technology readiness level one or, at maximum, level two,” says Dey. Technology readiness levels are used to assess the maturity of a particular technology, with level one the lowest and level nine the highest. When a technology is at level one, scientific research is just beginning to be translated into future research and development, while level two occurs once the basic practical applications have been applied to those research findings. Level two is very speculative as there is little to no experimental proof of concept for the technology.
“University research does not easily translate into a patent, product or company at such an early stage,” adds Dey. “But this problem can be partially mitigated with more industry-university collaborative research or sponsored research projects.”
As far as external challenges, the issue of patent or IP law comes top of the list.
“Patent law in general has been enacted only recently in the Arab world; for instance, in Saudi Arabia in 1985,” Bashir says. “In most cases, the patent system was established to protect technologies and businesses coming from outside and not home-grown inventions and technologies. It’s clear that the patent legal framework here needs modernization and reforms to accommodate for the registration and protection of research discoveries coming out of universities.
“Technology transfer is not a stationary model. It is a dynamic and progressive model and continuously needs evaluation, assessment and modernization to be relevant and fit for purpose.”
Today is Global World Environment Day. Though we should be aware of our impact on the environment every day, today is our chance to look at the statistics, make personal changes and commit to a greener lifestyle.
The U.N. General Assembly in 1972 designated June 5 World Environment Day to unite the world against environmental threats.
Collectively, we are responsible for 229,000 tons of plastic in the world’s oceans each year. With a staggering statistic like that, it’s no surprise this year’s theme is plastic pollution. This year the message is for individuals and businesses to contribute to a circular economy and rid the world of single-use plastic. This means we create useable items out of whatever we discard.
For example, companies like Circular & Co. are on a mission to equip us all with reusable water bottles. Each of its bottles is made from 14 disposed plastic water bottles. When they reach end of life, they are also recyclable. And there are many other companies popping up to combat plastic waste.
According the gDiapers, more than 300,000 plastic diapers end up in the ocean or landfills every minute. The company’s solution is a plastic-free disposable diaper that is collected after use and composted into soil.
But it’s not just on us individuals. Sure, we can choose to deal with companies that are sustainability focused and choose circular-economy options, but there are a lot of conglomerate giants out there that contribute to the plastic problem.
According to Break Free From Plastic’s 2022 brand audit, the top three contributors — Pepsi, Nestle and Coca-Cola — earned the first-place plastic trophy for the fifth consecutive year.
This is why the U.N. General Assembly in 2022 met with delegates from 147 countries to begin work on a global plastic treaty. The goal is to end plastic pollution by 2030.
IMAGE: Unsplash
But we don’t have to wait until 2030, and we don’t have to embark on a sustainable start-up. We can begin today on World Environment Day to do our part in ending plastic pollution.
Here are a few ways individuals can make a difference:
Say good-by to single-use plastic sandwich bags and cart your lunch to work in reusable containers.
Purchase a reusable water bottle rather than drink from disposable bottle.
Use cloth grocery bags.
For bin liners, choose bio-degradable options.
When ordering take-out, choose companies with recyclable packaging or returnable dishware.
Buy a reusable straw.
Drive an electric vehicle (if you can afford to).
A 2023 study by an Indonesian team suggests that microplastics — tiny bits of plastic measuring less than 5 millimeters — are everywhere, including our bodies. The threat to our health is serious.
“Living organisms can accumulate microplastics in cells and tissues, which results in threats of chronic biological effects and potential health hazards for humans including body gastrointestinal disorders, immunity, respiratory problem, cancer, infertility, and alteration in chromosomes,” the researchers say.
The paper was published in Science Direct.
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CAPTION: 3D printed food display IMAGE: Courtesy of FoodArtConcept
IMAGE: Caroline Ismail, founder and managing director-FoodArtConcept
Caption: Display at Qasr Al Hosn Museum, Abu Dhabi IMAGE: Courtesy of FoodArtConcept
