Test your food before you eat it

Another piece of future-ware shown at the 2006 designboom / BUESSEL competition. David Tsai, the designer of the so called “Nutrinator” imagines its use in assessing and tracking food content to allows for more conscious and careful food consumption.

…Are there peanuts in it? Is there MSG? How many calories is this meal? Nutrinator will let you know.

To do so the Nutrinator will use microtomography to analyze the content of your meal. Well there you go.
While microtomography is used since a few years mostly in medical equipment but also to analyse food, the size of such equipment is still merely that of a whole cupboard. Not to mention the substantial computing power required to process the wast amounts of data. I don’t think we need to mention the price of such equipment today.

Anyway, its a great design and a good idea (while somehow a bit obvious already). We expect, with Moore’s law still intact, to see such equipment around in about 5-8 years but in a price region not suitable for Joe Average’s household appliances budget.
More likely uses could include electronic food tasters to check for poisoning or other malpractices to mingle unwanted substances into our meals.