"Egg printer," Matt Brown. Photo by permission.

"Egg printer," Matt Brown. Photo by permission.

In Matt Brown's "Food and the Future of it," his final project for his masters in Interaction Design at the Umea Institute of Design in Umea, Sweden, he envisions that the food from the year 2040 would be synthetic and programmatic, made using three-dimensional printers and lab-grown meat.

"Henderson Apple," Matt Brown. Photo by permission.

He told us: "I'm a big fan of science fiction, and design fiction. Most of the pieces from this project are sort of like relics from this fictional future world I had in my head. They're meant to be looked at like they are fiction, not product solutions."

For his project, he imagined corporate-branded cartridges for printers that offer an infinite variety of flavors including extinct species such as dodo and wooly mammoth. And printers that can make patterns inside eggs (instead of a standard yolk), machines that make pasta in new and unique shapes, a device that generates cheese, beef that's grown on sticks (sort of like rock candy), meat grown with self-marinating beads that release flavor from the inside out, and apples that grow their own self-contained fruit salad.

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