Cook’s Science: Tell us about your work. What is the Open Agriculture Initiative?

Caleb Harper: [Open Agriculture is] a big initiative, and there are a lot of problems in food. I think our work will address many of them, but the biggest problem I see us solving is creating a next generation of farmers. A lot of our focus is on developing tools…which we call Food Computers as a general category. We have the Personal Food Computer, which we open-sourced six months ago and now has been built in 20 countries on 6 continents. These Personal Food Computers don’t grow a whole lot of food. [They’re] not about that. They’re about growing intelligence, growing skills, growing knowledge, especially [when they are used in schools]. They help teach about chemistry and biology, but also about data science and sensor science and electronics and coding. It’s been really successful in a lot of schools.

The next size up from the Personal Food Computer is what we call a Food Server, which is the size of a shipping container. Our last tool is the Food Data Center, which is the scale of a warehouse. This gets into real [food] production. But the cool thing is what links all three of these tools —the data we collect. We collect climate data that will tell us how that climate [within the Food Computer] will cause that plant to express [its genome]. So, the natural climate in Mexico, or the climate in Napa, or Bordeaux, or any other Food Computer climates we want to experiment with, they are the generators of flavor, color, texture, and size. And so, as kids, adults, scientists are doing experiments with Food Computers, they’re generating climate data. The technology between the three types of Food Computers is a bit different, but the data they produce, which we call ‘Open Phenome [Library],’ is really a sort of crowd-sourced science project.

CS: What problems are you and your team working to solve?

CH: I think probably one of the biggest problems is that people don’t really know a lot about food. General, normal people haven’t had to be involved in food in a long time. My ancestors came over during the land rush and were farmers but they left at some point because farms started to aggregate, and you started to have very big farms in the United States. That’s resulted in 2% of our population being farmers and their average age being 58. Think about that. A whole, important group of people, and this is pretty consistent around the world, is almost in their 60s. So, who’s the next generation of farmers? I think it’s going to be kids who are interested in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and STEAM. They’re going to be scientists who apply out-of-field knowledge [to agriculture]. Agricultural research has gone very deep but very narrow for a long time. And now I think we’re going to expand it across a bunch of different fields.

CS: It sounds like providing open-source material for making the Food Computers, and open-sourcing the data they collect, is a key part of your work. Why is this so important to you?

CH: There [are a] lot of people doing what I’m doing, in a way. You’ll see shipping container farms, you’ll see warehouse farms, you’ll see tiny farms in apartments, and I think that’s awesome. But the biggest thing I thought was missing was that everyone’s designing their own little solution and then they’re putting a patent on it. I was watching this happen, I visited all of them. I realized that informational transparency was necessary for this to do any good for the world. I want everyone to be able to tinker around with [Food Computers] and come up with new solutions because it’s the beginning, it’s not such an evolved field. And then I realized that even somewhat more than the machines, the data is also really important. Once I figured that out, I just started putting climate recipes in the public domain because I don’t want to see a day when climate recipes are patented, because there’s so much to learn. We have all this new technology like [Artificial Intelligence] and machine learning and computer vision. What people don’t talk about is that it takes massive data sets to use that stuff. You need trillions of data points. In this category we’re working on there are literally no working data sets. So how are we going to get some of the smartest people in the world to help us with the future of food if there’s no open data for anybody? And that became a really big lightbulb—I said I have to build the world’s biggest data sets for the future of farming so they can be used by smarter people than me, by algorithm folks, by chefs, so it has to be open. There’s no way I think this will be successful if it follows the very traditional agriculture model of closed source intellectual property.

CS: You mentioned chefs. How do you see your work interacting with chefs and restaurants?

CH: If you can imagine using Food Computers to grow ancient seeds, rare seeds, heirloom seeds . . . we grew some tomatoes in the lab that hadn’t been grown in 150 years. I think this can give a chef access to be really creative with things that aren’t available at their local level.

The other thing is approaching food like wine making. Wine makers will [deprive] the vineyard of water at a certain time to increase sugar production in the grapes, they’ll do all kinds of microclimate adjustments to achieve that 100-point wine. I think we’re going to see the same thing for food. Like a tomato that has that amazing, robust, ‘Tuscany in the summertime on the north slope’ taste, but is grown in Detroit [in a Food Computer]. It’s a lot about flavor. It’s about getting [chefs] access to things they haven’t had before. And I think a lot of chefs right now want to know about farming.

CS: So what’s next for you and your team?

CH: So much cool stuff. We just released version 2.0 of the Food Computer at the White House a few weeks ago. We are in full mode of developing that and making it better and getting it out to schools. I think 2017 will see hundreds of Food Computers in schools across the world. We have a project with the World Food Program where we’re bringing some [Food Computers] to refugee camps. We have our new lab [in Middleton, Massachusetts]. We’re going to do some ancient and rare genetics in there. We will be launching our not-for-profit, which at its core, is like a trust for the data, for the software and the hardware.

CS: What would you share with our readers who might be interested in getting involved with food computers and the future of farming?

CH: I would say, if you’re interested, join the forum, think about building a food computer, or think about funding one for a school and giving it as a gift, especially if you’re a parent.

The more “nerd farmers” we have, the better. If you want to grow [plants] and you have a hard time growing, use [the open-source Food Computer and climate recipes]. And when you grow, your data will be useful to someone else and you’ll be able to get data back. Once you get into this little “nerd farmer” community, amazing things start to happen. There are lots of questions and it’s early days, but it’s a really fun time to get involved because there aren’t many people who are that much better than anyone else. So, we’re going to explore and we’re going to have fun. But eventually that data will be used to grow food in cities in the future. I think that’s the legacy of the project.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Photos courtesy of Open Agriculture Initiative, MIT Media Lab.

Kristin Sargianis: [Over the noise of the stand mixer whirring. . . ] Hey Sasha, what are you working on?

Sasha Marx: [Doesn’t look up from the mixer. . . ] Hey. I am working on a seaweed pasta dough made with nori and also currently curing some tuna in seaweed for a poke dish.

KS: How’s it coming along?

SM: It’s coming. We did tastings of different permutations of the seaweed-cured tuna and settled on a version we all liked in terms of flavor and texture. Now I have to build the rest of the poke dish itself—all the other components. For the pasta, in the first test I only had a small amount of nori in the dough and we couldn’t taste it enough. In the version I’m working on right now I significantly increased the amount of nori and I think the flavor and texture are pretty awesome. I want to test and find the maximum amount of nori we can incorporate into the dough without sacrificing the texture of the pasta.

KS: When we first started talking about the seaweed story, you were quick to volunteer to develop the recipes. What got you excited about cooking with seaweed?

SM: I’ve been able to work with seaweed in restaurants and I’ve always enjoyed it as an ingredient. It brings a lot of interesting flavor and textures to food. It’s fun to work with, really tasty, though it might be somewhat daunting for home cooks. . . the idea of working with seaweed beyond the seaweed salad that you get at a typical sushi restaurant. I was excited about the opportunity to develop some recipes that show off the versatility of seaweed.

KS: Last week we went to visit Walrus and Carpenter Oysters’ seaweed farm in Rhode Island. What was something interesting you learned on our trip?

SM: I didn’t know that seaweed is a winter crop and how quickly it grows—I was amazed that sugar kelp can grow several inches per day.

KS: What was your favorite part of the trip?

SM: The best part was meeting the whole Walrus and Carpenter team and going out on the water with them and seeing how their farming setup works. We had talked with them briefly on the phone the week before and Jules, the founder and owner, had walked us through their operation, but going out on the water and seeing how the seaweed grows, where their operation is, getting a sense of how the seaweed growing cycle fits with the oyster growing cycle and harvest, that was the best part. Getting a first-hand look at farms is something that I was able to do at a number of restaurants that I worked at in the past, and it’s always an exciting learning experience.

KS: Did you have a least favorite part?  

SM: I don’t really know if I have a least favorite part. It did start to snow pretty heavily during the end of our trip. It was a little chilly on the water, but it felt appropriate for New England seafaring.

[Sasha walks away to crack eggs into a bowl for his pasta. I bide my time watching a test kitchen intern stir a pot of vegetables that contains the largest bay leaf I’ve ever seen. Seriously—it’s probably half the size of my palm. Sasha returns with cracked eggs.]

KS: [As Sasha adds an egg to the still-going stand mixer. . . ] Let’s switch gears and talk about the recipe you just finished working on.

SM: Procrastination Valentine’s Day! [Editor’s Note: Check out Cook’s Science on Monday, February 13th for all of your last-minute Valentine’s Day dessert needs.]

KS: What was your inspiration for that recipe?

SM: My inspiration was my own personal procrastinating experience when it comes to major holidays and food-related events. Originally, we had wanted to do a Cook’s Science procrastination Thanksgiving, but I did my best Daniel Day Lewis method acting on that and procrastinated until it was too late to develop a recipe. Then, when I saw Valentine’s Day coming up, something I’ve personally procrastinated on in the past, I thought we could try again. There’s tons of resources out there for the Valentine’s Day planners, but there’s nothing out there for those of us who aren’t planners at all.

KS: So, do you have any Valentine’s Day plans?

SM: Um…not yet. Again, in character. But I will. Hopefully my girlfriend doesn’t read this. There will be something. [Editor’s Note: This interview was conducted on Tuesday, February 7th. Sasha might have made plans by now.]

KS: Changing the subject. What did you eat for breakfast today?

SM: For breakfast I actually had half of a delicious Italian sub. For the Super Bowl I had ordered a bunch of subs from Monica’s Mercato in the North End [Editor’s Note: the North End is Boston’s Italian neighborhood]. I had one left over and I was trying to hold off and eat it at lunch, but I ate it at eight in the morning. Maybe not the most classic breakfast food, but it was pretty delicious.

KS: Now we’re going to play a word association game. I’m going to say a word and you need to say the first thing that comes to mind. Ready?

SM: Sure.

KS: Super Bowl.

SM: Pats!

KS: Seaweed.

SM: Mmmmm. . . I think I should be going faster than this. Uhhh. . . umami.

KS: Valentine’s Day.

SM: Panic.

KS: Test Cook.

SM: Weeded.

KS: What?

SM: “Weeded”, as in “in the weeds” because I need to get these recipes done, but you said I could only use one word.

KS: Last question. When will this pasta be ready for tasting?

SM: This pasta? Probably in an hour or so. Dough needs to come together and rest before I roll it out.

3D-printed parts have made their way onto jetliners, and NASA is currently working on a 3D-printed rocket engine. In the realm of biotechnology, 3D printers have been used to make prosthetic limbs for humans and animals. There’s a prototype that 3D prints functional human skin (!) for transplanting onto burn victims’ wounds, potentially eliminating the need for skin grafts. Fashion has even gotten into the game, with designers 3D printing bespoke shoes and fabrics.

As 3D printing has started to make its way into the culinary world and a handful of chefs are experimenting with printing beautiful, edible designs, I had to wonder: Is the technology ready? Should I set aside some of my meager kitchen counter space for a 3D printer? Is 3D printing poised to revolutionize the way we eat?

PRESSING ‘PRINT’ IN THE KITCHEN

Unlike a regular, two-dimensional printer, which applies a single layer on a flat surface, a 3D printer starts with that bottom layer and then builds upward from there in a variety of materials—what’s known as additive manufacturing. It turns a digital file into a physical object. 3D printers have caused ripples among engineers because they allow for unprecedentedly rapid testing and retesting of designs. New iterations of parts or products can be 3D printed virtually on demand, eliminating the need to create new molds and casts each time and vastly speeding up the design process.

And a number of chefs have taken advantage of early iterations of edible 3D printing technology to create unique, decorative, customized elements for their guests.

Kriss Harvey, executive pastry chef at The Bazaar by José Andrés in Los Angeles, California, has used the ChefJet Pro culinary 3D printer to create life-size, three-dimensional bananas made entirely of sugar and decorated with images of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe portraits. Josiah Citrin, chef-owner of Mélisse restaurant in Santa Monica, California, has used the same 3D printer in a savory application: a modern riff on classic French onion soup. He and his team printed “croutons” made of caramelized onion powder. Inside each crouton was a ball of onion petal–wrapped burrata, which mimicked the soup’s traditional cheese topping. The croutons dissolved in diners’ bowls as hot oxtail broth was poured over them. “The broth had no onion flavor at all, but when the crouton melted, the onion flavor mixed with the broth,” Citrin explained.

Paco Pérez, chef at Enoteca Paco Pérez in Barcelona, Spain, has used a 3D printer to pipe an elaborate pattern of seafood puree onto a plate, evoking the shape of fan coral. Pérez then places other elements on the plate by hand—sea urchin, carrot foam, egg—to create the finished dish.

Other culinary professionals use 3D printers to create customized objects and tools for use in the kitchen and the dining room—similar to the printers’ traditional use. Peter Zaharatos, owner of SugarCube cafe in Long Island City, New York, uses a 3D printer, along with his background as an architect and a sculptor, to print unique, customized molds for chocolate bars. (He also 3D-printed all of the physical components of his cafe, but that’s another story.) He uses software to design what he ultimately wants the chocolate bar to look like, prints that on his 3D printer, and uses it to create a mold, which he’ll fill with chocolate to create the final product. Harvey envisions something similar: “If I can see a design in my mind’s eye [and then create a mold for it] using my 3D printer . . . that gives me an advantage over the next guy.”

Nathan Myhrvold, says Scott Heimendinger, technical director at Modernist Cuisine, “had an idea that, in addition to coming up with our own dishes, we would literally make our own ‘dishes’ . . . our own porcelain plateware.” In collaboration with Shapeways, the team 3D-printed molds that ultimately were turned into ceramic dishes.”

SOLUTIONS LOOKING FOR A PROBLEM

Considering that I love making French onion soup the old-fashioned way (in a pot) and have had good luck with store-bought plateware up to this point in my life, I had to wonder if a 3D food printer was for me—or any home cook, for that matter.

Talking to Heimendinger, I realized I’m not alone in my skepticism. He said, “3D printing of edible stuff still feels a little bit like a solution looking for a problem . . . I see a lot of [3D-printed] things and think, ‘That’s so gorgeous,’ but I wouldn’t necessarily order it off of the menu.”

To create the absinthe service, the Modernist Cuisine team used a version of the ChefJet Pro printer. It creates intricate confections by binding very thin layers of fine powdered sugar (which can be mixed with other sweet or savory powdered ingredients) with a liquid, which can be colored and flavored. If you desire detailed 3D-printed sweet treats covered with colorful patterns, the ChefJet Pro might be your cup of (sugary) tea. But while it can print elaborate, even architectural designs, the powder and liquid construction method limits your options for different textures or flavor profiles.

Other 3D food printers offer a bit more versatility. Instead of working in a bed of sugar, these printers function by extruding thin layers of food—with an appropriate consistency—out of a nozzle. The layers build vertically, creating three-dimensional shapes: trees, pyramids, dinosaurs—whatever your imagination (and your software design ability) can dream up.

Barcelona-based Natural Machines created the approximately $4,000 Foodini, an extruder-style 3D food printer, to “streamline some of cooking’s more rote activities” and “encourage people to eat more healthy foods,” according to the company’s website. The user fills stainless-steel capsules with raw ingredients and attaches an appropriate nozzle depending on the food’s texture. Suggested recipes include gnocchi, ravioli (the pasta and the filling use separate capsules), veggie burgers, pizza, quiche, crackers, and cookies, which, in most cases, still need to be cooked after printing.

After perusing some of Foodini’s creations, I’m still not clear on why I would want to make my pizza, gnocchi, or cookies using the machine. I still have to prepare all my ingredients (dough, sauce, filling, and so on), then fill the capsules, press “print,” and wait just as long for the machine to 3D-print my food as it would have taken me to shape, roll, or form everything myself. And I still have to cook it. Plus, I’ll have to wash the capsules and nozzles, which as anyone who has washed pastry piping tips can attest, is a pain. It’s not obvious to me, as Heimendinger noted, what problem, exactly, this machine is solving—it’s not saving me time, effort, or expense. And as for the health angle, unless the printer is able to physically restrain me from doing so, I’m still going to toss those gnocchi in browned butter and serve them with a salad on the side. You know, for balance.

Is your inner food geek craving something higher tech? Want even more control over the food you print? Then forget about sugar and pizza sauce and focus on food “pixels.” Hod Lipson, professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University and author of Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing, and his team at the Creative Machines Lab, have spent several years working on what they’re referring to as the “food printer.” Their current model can print in 12 different ingredients at once and, according to Lipson, it “assembles the food, pixel by pixel,” meaning it prints tiny dots of different ingredients side by side and layer by layer to create varied textures and flavors within a single print. “It [in essence] mixes two different materials, not using a spatula, but by placing very fine dots next to each other.” Lipson noted that these dots—which he compared to the resolution on a digital image—can range in diameter from more than 1 millimeter, for something like cookie dough, down to 200 microns for an ingredient like oil or water. Though still in the prototype phase, this sounds intriguing (or at least not something a home cook could easily achieve on her own).

In 2016, Lipson and his team partnered with chef Hervé Malivert, director of food technology at the International Culinary Center in New York City, and his students to test the food printer and exercise their culinary creativity. A mixture of cooked polenta, goat cheese, and honey was “one of the most successful recipes,” said Malivert, though he noted it took about 10 minutes to print. (“Could a similar result have been achieved with a piping bag and some patience?” I thought.) Cookie dough and pâte à choux also worked well, but for every 3D success, as with any new technology, there were just as many flops. For example, 3D printing a mousseline fish puree looked promising but, according to Malivert, “when we tried to cook [the printed mousselines], they tended to shrink and the shape changed . . . so that needed work.”

A more recent prototype is able to cook the food while it prints, using infrared heat—potentially solving chef Malivert’s shrinking mousseline conundrum. The team is currently exploring using lasers as an even more accurate cooking method, something that, according to Lipson, “is a totally unexplored part of cooking.”

Other extruder-based 3D food printers, such as the CocoJet, ChocALM, and the PancakeBot, work with specific ingredients: chocolate and pancake batter, respectively. The PancakeBot features a heated printing surface, which cooks the pancakes as you print your (barely three-dimensional) design. You still have to flip the pancakes yourself. At only $299, it’s the most affordable of the bunch, but I think I’ll hold out for a self-flipping feature and stick to making quirky pancake shapes using my trusty squeeze bottle.

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

The professionals I spoke with don’t envision 3D printing taking over restaurant or home kitchens anytime soon, due to their high costs, lengthy print times, and limited functionality. They also don’t believe 3D printers will replace the human act of cooking. “I don’t think people are going to print their whole meal . . . They’ll still do their cooking, but they might add a 3D printed [element] to add a different flavor, or for a nutritional component,” said Malivert. But with significant advances in the technology, they all agreed that it could have the potential to impact particular aspects of the food industry.

One vision is that foods could be printed based on biometric data about the individual eater and could contain computer-customized ingredients and nutrients fine-tuned for each person. According to Heimendinger, “Bespoke or customized nutrition is a great opportunity for 3D printing, not only for getting nutrients into your meal in a precise way, but also for having data and traceability on your nutritional intake, which is currently a big missing puzzle piece.”

Lipson agrees. “From a health point of view, it’s the ultimate thing. Today we tend to eat one-size-fits-all food. Imagine that you wake up in the morning and the slice of bread that you eat was baked on the spot for you, it doesn’t have any preservatives and [its ingredients are] based on your specific biometrics.”

What if 3D printers could make their way into hospitals, nursing homes, and even schools as a way to meet individual nutritional needs? Malivert imagines a hospital “having a 3D printer that’s able to print [an edible item] to meet [each patient’s] needs, that has vitamins, and that’s also nice and flavorful, maybe with a little crunch.”

Heimendinger imagines a new field of food materials science “when the technology takes a leap in scale downward. When we’re able to manipulate things at a [close to] molecular scale, we’ll be able to essentially do food material science through the use of 3D-printer-like technologies. You’ll be able to achieve some of the textures we love through new means. Imagine a French fry that is always crispy, that’s never soggy, but was never fried in oil.”

Someday we might even see printed food in space. In 2013, NASA awarded a contract to an Austin, Texas-based startup to design a 3D food printer to be used on a future manned mission to Mars to provide astronauts with freshly prepared hot meals customized to their personal nutritional needs.  

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently used a 3D printer to help engineer the equivalent of “edible origami.” Thin, flat sheets of gelatin and starch transform into three-dimensional shapes—tubes, curves, even flowers—when submerged in water. The team created these intricate shapes by precisely 3D printing patterns of edible cellulose, which doesn’t absorb water, over the top gelatin layer, which quickly expands as it absorbs water. They believe their findings could help drastically reduce shipping costs for foods such as pasta by allowing them to be packaged as space-saving flat sheets that only take their final shape when cooked.

Just like any technology in its early stages, the kinks of 3D food printing still need to be ironed out. In their current state, the printers on the market today don’t appear to improve upon the abilities of cooks, both amateur and professional, to make beautiful foods that are full of flavor and with appealing textures, nor do they save time or money. However, there’s no denying the technology’s future potential. Perhaps, in the future, when you get home from work, hungry and tired, you’ll head into your kitchen and press “print,” but for now, I think I’ll save that last bit of counter space for my food processor.

Header image by Chris Hoover / Modernist Cuisine, LLC. 

Cook’s Science: Synthetic biology is a not a field most people are familiar with. Can you explain, in a nutshell, what you and your colleagues do here at Ginkgo Bioworks?

Christina Agapakis: We’re interested in how to build and make stuff with biology. And it grows in this way that’s inherently sustainable and part of ecosystems. We see biology as a better way to make stuff and we see it impacting a lot of different industries as a result. At Ginkgo, the focus of the company has been on making biology easier to design, easier to engineer, and building a platform on which biological engineers can use biology to build something new.

A lot of our business today is in cultured ingredients, which is the idea that you can genetically engineer yeast to produce [specific molecules or compounds] during the process of fermentation. These are often flavors or fragrances, specialty ingredients, or even nutritional ingredients.

CS: Our team at Cook’s Science and much of the general public, is familiar with yeast and with using bacteria to ferment pickles, beets, sauerkraut, etc. How does that sort of fermentation relate to the fermentation you’re doing at Ginkgo Bioworks?

CA: It’s the same biochemical process . . . the same transformation of sugar into something else by the yeast cells. When you’re talking about beer, that’s yeast taking the sugars from barley or other grains and transforming them into alcohol, carbon dioxide, and all the flavors you get along with the beer. What we do [at Ginkgo Bioworks] is start with that process and say: What enzymes can we take from other plants or other organisms and add them to the yeast [by modifying the yeast’s DNA] so that during fermentation, some of the energy from the sugar is going to create another product as well as the alcohol and carbon dioxide.

One product that’s been made using fermentation for a long time is amino acids, especially amino acids used in animal feed. Those are produced in huge vats on a huge scale; a scale that would not have been possible if you were trying to purify amino acids from proteins from another food source. But there are other kinds of products [made using fermentation], especially in fragrances and cosmetics. There are a lot of compounds present in very small quantities in plants and extracting them has led to a situation where [companies] have farmed or harvested those plants to near-extinction, so now the resource is constrained. Now, [with synthetic biology] there’s the opportunity to be able to synthetically make these compounds at a scale that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.

CS: What are some industries or companies you’ve designed microbes for?

CA: We work with companies like Robertet, which is a flavor and fragrance company, on different ingredients. [Editor’s Note: For example, Ginkgo and Robertet are currently working to insert DNA sequences into yeast so they will produce rose scent compounds during fermentation.] During development here in the lab, we do fermentation in about 250-milliliter containers, about the size of a soda can. When a product eventually goes to full, commercial-scale fermentation, it can grow to 50,000 liters in just a couple of days, which shows you what biology can do when the yeast itself acts like the factory that makes these molecules or compounds.

CS: How would you define “synthetic” in the context of what you’re doing at Ginkgo Bioworks? Aren’t yeast technically natural organisms?

CA: That’s a really good question and a really hard question. I think how we define synthetic is so tied up in all of these philosophical and historical narratives and arguments. The organisms we’re working with are pretty close to naturally-occurring yeasts and other microbes but they have been modified. We have added or taken away genes from their genomes. And I think that difference is important . . . The question of how different [are these organisms] and at what point do they cross [the line between natural and synthetic], I  think that’s something people have to decide for themselves.

CS: How do you see synthetic biology intersecting with the culinary world: restaurants, chefs, home cooks, even consumers at the grocery store?

CA: There’s a lot that is happening, or has happened, and a lot that will happen in the future. Many ingredients or enzymes are already produced using fermentation or biotechnology, things that we don’t necessarily know or think about . . . enzymes that are used in cheese production, brewing, baking, or other kinds of preservation or transformation of food, [many of] those are already made using biotechnology. There’s a lot of potential for synthetic biology to improve the efficiency of those enzymes or find new enzymes that will enable new tastes or send things in new directions.

CS: Is there a example of the intersection between synthetic biology and food or cooking that struck you as particularly interesting?

CA: Cheese. You need enzymes to make cheese. An enzyme called chymosin is present in rennet [a complex of enzymes used to coagulate milk in cheesemaking]. Rennet, historically, has come from the stomach lining of calves, but now the majority of rennet used in cheese production comes from genetically modified fungi that are able to produce that enzyme, instead of extracting it from an animal. We’re working on other enzymes that are used in cheese production—for guiding the flavor of different types of cheese—that are also often extracted from animals. So we’re looking at ways of making them [using synthetic biology instead].

CS: So, I have to ask you about the cheese project. How did you come up with the idea to use bacteria cultured from humans to make cheese? What did you hope to learn from the experiment?

CA: About seven years ago, as a graduate student, I was part of a project called Synthetic Aesthetics, which paired synthetic biologists with artists to explore the potential connections between science and technology, and art and design. My partner was Sissel Tolaas, an odor researcher based in Berlin . . . her work is about perceiving smells in different ways and being aware of how our prejudices and emotions dictate whether we say a smell is good or bad. I was working on microbes and synthetic biology and was particularly interested in microbial communities. There are microbial communities on [human skin] that make body odors—that’s where [those odors] come from. So we started asking what are those microbes, what are the chemicals they produce, and what can we learn about them. And as we started to do that research, looking for papers on the species of bacteria [found on human skin], everything was turning up cheese. And then we realized, oh wow, there’s a connection: There’s a cheese that smells like feet!

We started digging into what people already know about this connection . . . and then at one point we said, “well, let’s just make some cheese [using bacteria cultured from people] and see what happens.” It gets a very visceral reaction, because it does feel wrong, I think, to have the bacteria go from your feet to your food. That was a feeling we wanted to explore and challenge. We wanted to ask, if we do domesticate bacteria more, if people are using microbes in their home cooking more and more . . . how is that going to change our relationship to them? How is it going to change our relationship with our own bodies and the bacteria there? Will we still draw these kinds of boundaries around ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bacteria, or will those shift, too? [Editor’s Note: I know you’re curious . . . Agapakis only sampled the cheese cultured from her own bacteria.]

CS: Tell us about your role as creative director at Ginkgo Bioworks. That’s not a title we often associate with biotechnology companies.

CA: Creative teams at technology companies [like Ginkgo Bioworks] are really thinking about the edge between science and technology and the world. How do you communicate the news stories to the general public? How do you package the stories? How do you create products that are going to make sense in the real world?

CS: Do you have a favorite microbe?

CA: [Laughing] I love them all equally. There are some bacteria that make these really gorgeous patterns as they grow [on cultured media]. It’s called Paenibacillus vortex—they make these just outrageous patterns as they spread over Petri dishes, it’s really beautiful. There’s also a [genus of] photosynthetic bacteria called Anaebena, which can do a lot of really interesting things. [They’re] also kind of multicellular in that they make these really long filaments of cells. I love bacteria that blur the boundary between single cellular and multicellular . . . when bacteria have multicellularity and these complex relationships with each other, I think it’s really beautiful.

CS: Where do you see the field of synthetic biology heading in the next 5-10 years? What kinds of products might we be eating, wearing, or using that were developed using genetically modified microbes?

CA: I think we’ll start to see new materials. [For example], there’s a company called Bolt Threads that’s producing spider silk using yeast. I think we’ll also see new flavors and new enzymes making an impact along the supply chain. I also hope to see new questions being asked about how synthetic biology can affect the culinary world or people who are trying to ferment things at home. It’s fun to think about what a chef or a home pickler would do with a specific microbe, where would they take it? This is an important element to my role . . . I think the future emerges from how people interact [with the technology] . . . using their creativity and intuition for food or flavor to take it in a new direction. There is the potential to ask: What microbes are there? How can we control them differently to add new dimensions to flavor? And then the sky’s the limit because anything can be fermented.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Photography by Kevin White.