Food Tech

We all know that technology and food work together, but the microwave is just the start. It’s time to indulge the geek and the glutton inside us, at the same time. Just don’t get chicken grease on the keys.

The PS3 grill

When the Playstation 3 was unveiled to the public in 2005, general consensus was that it looked less like a sleek, cutting-edge lifestyle machine and more like a big, black brick. Time has proved that it’s also about as impressive as a brick, at least for the time being. Photoshopped images online began to pick up on the similarities between the PS3 and heavyweight boxer George Foreman’s line of grills, the George Foreman Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machines (tagline: “It’s so good, I put my name on it!”). So when the PS3 was released last year the logical thing to do, it seems, was to disembowel the $3,700 machine and install a grill plate in its place.
The man behind the conversion was James Kingham. “It was mainly to annoy Sony fanboys,” he says. “The people who sent me hate mail were people who couldn’t get hold of a PS3 on launch day.” So far his site’s had over six million hits, and he’s built two PS3 grills, selling them over eBay.

The Breakfix Cereal Dispenser

So you’ve finally woken up, hit the snooze button twice, woken up again, dragged yourself out of bed, jumped into the shower and pulled some clothes on, only to realize that you still have to endure the tiresome task of pouring your own cereal! Breakfast is, after all, the most important meal of the day – but when it’s a toss-up between shaking like mad for the last stale crumbs that get caught between the bag and the box, and just feeling faint and weak with hunger for the next four hours, then emaciation it is!

The Dishmaker

MIT postgrad Leonardo Bonanni has come up with a machine that forms plates, bowls and cups out of small acrylic discs, with a stack of 150 taking up the same space as a small stack of CDs. Admittedly, the machine is a size of the dishwasher, but it’s a great concept: choose how many plates you want, and the machine shapes them for you in real time. When you’re done, feed them back into the machine and they’re pressed back into discs, ready to be used again. OK, so there are problems with the plan, as there’s no built-in washing system and the plates are pretty small; but for a prototype it’s not doing too bad. It’s green-friendly too, with the makers claiming that the necessary energy to recycle one of these plates, three times a day, for a year, is equivalent to the energy needed to fire just one ceramic plate. Al Gore is eating off them already.

The Counter Intelligence Group at MIT who came up with the Dishmaker have thought up some pretty cool stuff: the kitchen sink that adjusts its height to the user, or the X-ray fridge with a camera inside, which projects its contents onto the outside of the fridge, as well as maybe being able to send the image to your phone. No more pointless milk runs.

Search “dishmaker” on youtube.com and watch the questionably fascinating process.

The Automatic Musical Barbecue

www.kee-tat.com
Local inventor Ricky Cheung decided that what the world needed was an automatic musical barbecue – and lo, he delivered. Why did he do it? “No real reason. I just like eating barbecued chicken wings, really. My wife inspired me to create it after she woke up one night with a craving for them.” Sure, it looks like a bad 80s talking robot, but this machine has hidden talents. Simply mount your skewered chicken in the rotating drum, plug in your iPod, and watch your chicken wings boogie on down to a song of your choice. We suggest “Disco Inferno” by The Trammps. It’ll set you back a cool $128,000, but surely it’s impossible to put a price on utter satisfaction. “Music is important in Hong Kong and helps us to relax, so it made sense to add it to a cooking environment,” says Cheung. Food and technology march on – but this time, to a soundtrack.

The iPhone cake