Researchers at the MIT Media Lab’s Tangible Media Group have managed to make shape-shifting pasta, edible origami 🙂 Why? To package and ship pasta more efficiently for example. But of course they have many examples of culinary potential for this technology.

The researchers have created flat sheets of gelatin and starch that, when submerged in water, instantly sprout into three-dimensional structures, including common pasta shapes such as macaroni and rotini. The researchers presented their work in a paper this month at the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2017 Computer-Human Interaction Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. They describe their shape-morphing creations as not only culinary performance art, but also a practical way to reduce food-shipping costs.

“We did some simple calculations, such as for macaroni pasta, and even if you pack it perfectly, you still will end up with 67 percent of the volume as air,” says Wen Wang, a co-author on the work and a former graduate student and research scientist in MIT’s Media Lab. “We thought maybe in the future our shape-changing food could be packed flat and save space.”

By Kristina de Verdier on 30 May, 2017 In edible origami, efficient, flat pasta, Food, Innovation, MIT, packaging