Feel like eating a hamburger? Or would you rather have a pizza? No problem, the 3D food printer will create anything you want, literally at the click of a button.

Scientists at Cornell University in New York are developing a commercially viable 3D food printer, which uses raw food 'inks' that are fed into the printer and once you load the recipe and press the button, voila!

An electronic blueprint states exactly what materials go where and are drawn up using traditionalengineering computer-aided design (CAD) software.

"FabApps would allow you to tweak your food's taste, texture and other properties. Maybe you really love biscuits, but want them extra flaky. You would change the slider and the recipe and the instructions would adjust accordingly," the Daily Mail quoted Dr Jeffrey Ian Lipton as saying.

So anything that can be loaded into syringes - liquidcheese, chocolate and cake batter - can be printed out! So far, they have had some success creating cookies, cake and 'designer domes' made of turkey meat.

Homaro Cantu, chef at Chicago's Moto, has "printed sushi using an ink jet printer".

"You can imagine a 3D printer making homemade apple pie without the need for farming the apples, fertilising, transporting, refrigerating, packaging, fabricating, cooking, serving and the need for all of the materials in these processes like cars, trucks, pans, coolers, etc.," said Cantu.

"3D printing will do for food what e-mail and instant messaging did for communication."

(Read by Lee Hannon. Lee Hannon is a journalist at the China Daily Website.)

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(Agencies)