“At the moment we are working on edible robots as robotic food, and you think, “Well, hold on, if I’ve got a plate of spaghetti, why would I ever want it to be robotic?” Well there are several reasons. If you have a young child, for example, who doesn’t like to eat their food, if the food is more entertaining on the plate perhaps that’s gonna encourage them to eat it. That’s kind of trivial, but actually a quite important example. Now an even more important pressing example is people who’ve had a stroke for example, and they can’t swallow very well. What happens if your robotic food would swallow itself into your stomach? You put it in your mouth and it would worm its way into your stomach. There you have the pleasure of eating, you don’t have to eat some horrible, thin down liquid and the food will deliver nutrients exactly where it’s needed. That’s the work we’re developing at the moment [in the RoboFood project] and we think this is going to take a bit of time, but it’s really exciting.”

– Excerpt from Jonathan Rossiter’s conversation with Harry Lewis on The Naked Scientists (18th of January 2022)