Imagine sitting down to a fine-dining meal in which droplets of sauce dynamically move basil leaves and other garnishes around the plate in preprogrammed patterns. Alternatively, you could choose to mix and match droplets to create your own flavor profile. That's the long-term goal of the so-called "Dancing Delicacies" computational food project, which brings together scientists from Monash University’s Exertion Games Lab, Carnegie Mellon University’s Morphing Matter Lab, and Gaudi Labs in Switzerland to explore innovative new ways to turn meals into interactive performance art. Their latest invention is a 3D-printed plate that uses electrical voltage to manipulate liquid droplets, according to a paper published as part of the 2023 Designing Interactive Systems Conference.

“Cooking and eating is more than simply producing a dish and then facilitating energy intake,” co-author Floyd Mueller of Monash told Forbes. “It is about sharing, caring, crafting, slowing down and self-expression, and Dancing Delicacies aims to highlight these virtues at a time when they are often forgotten. The integration of food and computing will transform how we understand both computing and food as not two very different things, but a new frontier that combines the best of both.”

Chefs have been working with this kind of innovation for years via the molecular gastronomy and molecular mixology movements, creating a "Flor de Caco" dessert in which a cocoa bean expands like a flower when exposed to hot chocolate sauce, for instance. Then there was that cocktail (the "Disco Sour") that changed color when blended with citrus, thanks to the incorporation of butterfly pea flower tea, which is a pH-sensitive ingredient. On the technology side, in 2014, MIT's Media Matters Lab experimented with a shape-changing fork that inflated depending on how fast a person ate. Another fork design was outfitted with electronics, in which an LED changed from red to green when users touched a food item with a conductive element, indicating how much water was in the food.

Other groups have experimented with programming foodstuffs to enable food to transform physically. For instance, in 2021, the CMU Morphing Matter Lab introduced flat pasta that takes on a specific 3D shape when cooked. In 2017, they made edible 2D-layered films of protein, cellulose, or starch that morphed into 3D shapes as they absorbed water, such as pasta shapes and flowers. The top layer was denser and thus absorbed more water than the bottom. So when the film was immersed in water, the top layer would curl over the bottom layer to form an arch. The researchers also found they could achieve greater control over when and how much the films would bend by topping the two-layer film with a 3D-printed strip of cellulose, which acted as a water barrier, thereby controlling how much water the top layer was exposed to.