The following article, written by food critic Shelton Martin, appeared in the November 2026 edition of Contemporary Living Internet Journal.

You have to admire the folks at the Makoto Electronics for their courage; they surely know my reputation for brutal, hard-hitting food reviews. But when they offered to place one of their expensive new digital meal fabricators in my kitchen for a month-long test, who was I to dodge the challenge?

To be perfectly honest, I came to the table (so to speak) with a very negative view of the whole enterprise. Food produced in fabricators is largely artificial. The leg of lamb is not actually a lamb's leg, but a mixture of chemicals, spices, artificial flavorings, meat, meat by-products, and edible fillers designed to replicate the taste and texture of the real thing. Fabricators are small, remotely based manufacturing units that construct products using digital codes downloaded from the Internet. Early versions, called fabbers, used wax, powdered ceramic, and liquid polymer to create realistic three-dimensional objects. Architects could scan models of buildings they were designing and e-mail the scanning codes to their clients. The fabricator, located in the client's office, would then use the codes to reconstruct the same models accurate to a fraction of a millimeter. The introduction of home fabricators, capable of manufacturing a variety of household objects, created a brief e-commerce boom a few years ago. But the bubble quickly burst when the units proved to be bulky, expensive, and limited in the number of product available for fabrication. Although, "home factories" never caught on, many analysts think meal fabricators will fare better. The worldwide appetite for quickly prepared home meals is as old as TV dinners and microwave ovens.

My first venture into cyberspace dining consisted of a four-course dinner from ChezSeurat.eat, a Web site operated by a highly regarded café in Lyon, France. The fabricator's e-commerce search engine allowed me to choose my meal from a small but growing menu of restaurants, and the on-board computer processed the order and controlled the other five components of the fabricator ­ refrigerator, freezer, dry storage bin, meal construction chamber, and microwave cooking unit. The meal prepared itself in about 45 minutes, from log-in to first bite, and was surprisingly good. My Coq Au Vin was a bit dry, but the champagne sorbet was cold and just the right consistency. Put on a disk of French music, close your eyes as you eat, and you might think you're in Lyon.

The process of fabrication is a miracle of modern technology. The unit "constructs" the meal microslice by microslice (building from bottom to top) and cooks or heats portions as necessary. Currently, meal fabricators are about the size of a sofa turned on its end. Installation consists of connecting the device to household power and water. Makoto supplied me with a starter set of "Gourmet Ingredient Packages (GIP)," which is their commercial name for the containers of concentrated materials used to fabricate meals. GIPs work like those ink-jet printer cartridges we used to use: when the yellow ink ran out, you replaced the whole unit. With meal fabricators, you replace a container when one of its ingredients runs out. Most suppliers manufacture GIPs (sold at large grocery stores or ordered on the Internet and delivered by mail) to last for 80 to 100 meals, depending on individual eating habits such as meal size and type of meal consumed.

Although there are fewer than 10,000 meal fabricators in use today, investors clearly smell big profits. Any cooking school worth its salt is offering a course in the preparation of fabricated meals, and it seems that every mom and pop restaurant from Podunk to Paris is rushing to serve the specialty of the house on-line. (Are the chefs at Al's Diner on Route 6 and their programmers up to the task?) Digital food fabrication promises to change not only the way we dine, but to fundamentally transform the Internet from a method of exchanging information to an instrument for delivering producer goods.

I'm no financial genius, just a not-so-humble food critic. But how can anything fail that tastes great, gets to the table quickly, and requires absolutely no tip? Still, there's many a slip between cup and lip and the road to long-term success in e-commerce has been historically lumpy. Some worry about the effects on the current restaurant industry, but don't. Times change and people adjust. E-commerce problem solvers out there just need to concentrate on identifying and solving the business challenges presented by digital food fabrication so that this upstart venture will turn as green as that stuff I ate as if it were real lettuce.