Not many sushis restaurants ask their patrons to provide urine and saliva samples upon entrance, but in our era of hyper-personalization, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. From the Japanese company Open Meals, which debuted its complex 3D-printed sushi at the South by Southwest festival in Austin last year, comes a new range of high tech food that’s tailored specifically to the nutritional needs of its diners.

Set to launch in Tokyo next year, “Sushi Singularity” relies on a system of 3D printers, CNC routers, lasers, robotic arms and other components most often associated with industrial design to produce edible sculptures made of sushi ingredients. In each item on the menu, you’ll find common sushi elements like tuna, squid, eel and seaweed, but it’ll be in a form you’ve never seen before.

In order to mix each custom cocktail of nutrients in an aesthetically pleasing way through its machinery, Open Meals transforms each ingredient into a gel or paste. Menu items include “micro pillar saltwater eel,” “oze tick kappa roll,” “dash soup universe,” “anisotropic stiffness steamed shrimp,” “negative stiffness honeycomb octopus,” “cell cultured tuna,” “powdered sintered uni” and “squid castle.” When customers make a reservation, it’ll trigger the system to automatically send them a biodata kit in the mail, which requests urine, saliva and stool samples. The results will determine the exact creations you’re ultimately served when you arrive.

Here’s how they describe their process:

“Food Ingredient Cartridges: These will contain sustainable food ingredients such as seaweed and crickets, which are mixed with water, fiber, and enzymes for output. Nutrient Cylinders: 11 types of nutrients in cylindrical cartridges. Foods will be nutritionally optimized based on a Health ID. Alginate Fermenter: Produces spherical food in a chemical reaction between sodium alginate and calcium solution. Artificial light farm: Cultivates fresh vegetables in enclosed spaces through use of artificial light such as LEDs. Hot Water FDM: Items that cannot be formed at room temperature or in air can be realized by outputting them in hot water.”

“SLS: Laser Sintered 3D Printer. Powder-based raw materials are baked into specific shapes using lasers. FFM Control Interface: The brain of the entire machine, which combines various data to design and hyper-personalize food. Laser FDM: Thermolysis Laminated 3D Printer. The raw material is melted by heat and formed by stacking layers. Robot arm: The unit is equipped with an ultra-high precision arm. Chilled FDM: Outputs at ultra low temperatures to realize shapes impossible at room temperature. 6-axis CNC router: Cuts the material with a multi-axis router, enabling precise, elaborate modeling. Fermenter: Cultivates food ingredients in real time through precise management of water temperature and nutrients.”

Whether or not any of this actually sounds appetizing to you, the final result is certainly artistic, and perhaps a signal of what’s to come to the world of food in the near future as this kind of technology grows more accessible.

Instagram might have made it famous, but the fine art of crafting a delicious pie so intricate you’re almost loathe to cut into its crust is much older than the modern ‘food art’ trend. Centuries ago, the richest and most flamboyant members of high society sought out talented head cooks who could present a sufficiently impressive dining experience filled not just with the finest ingredients, but also edible sculptural wonders.

Conrad Hagger, who worked for the Archbishop of Vienna in the 18th century, wrote a book called ’Neues Saltzburgisches Kochbuch 1719’(The Salzburg Cookbook) that included drawings of pies with elaborate shapes like towering reindeer, sea monsters and swans. And if you’re a Game of Thrones fan, you may recall the infamous Pigeon Pie at the fateful Purple Wedding – the monstrous one Joffrey cut into with a sword, releasing live pigeons into the air (psst… here’s a recipe for a replica, minus the live birds.)

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A post shared by Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin (@thepieous)

It may be rare to see creations of quite that intricacy on the average dinner table today, but that doesn’t mean we’ve lost the art altogether. Pie making has always been among the quiet domestic arts practiced primarily by women, with decorative touches ranging from simple flowers to crusts woven like tapestries. Modern bakers are keeping the tradition alive with more contemporary designs, like those found on the blog and Instagram account Pies are Awesome, who’ve created pies inspired by pop culture phenomena like Stranger Things and Star Wars.

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Some of the coolest modern pies come from bakers Lauren Ko and Karen Pfeiff Boschek, whose work is almost mathematical in its precision. While some of the designs fare better than others post-baking (in one of her Instagram posts, Ko admits that Boschek is better practiced at this, calling her a “butter sorceress”), all of the designs are sure to drop jaws at the table.

You don’t necessarily need skills to be a food artist these days, now that smartphone apps make it possible to do things like print custom designs on your breakfast. A gadget called the Toasteroid (a toaster on steroids?) caters to those who demand more than just the browning of bread from the typically simple kitchen appliance, boasting that it also functions as a personal weather forecaster, private messenger and doodle pad. If Kickstarter is any gauge, there’s been a long-simmering demand for just such a device.

The Toasteroid comes with a companion mobile app, and you connect your smart phone to the toaster via Bluetooth. Choose from a collection of templates available within the app or draw your own design, which will have to be fairly simple and pixelated by virtue of the way the toaster works. You can also request that the toaster prints today’s weather right onto your breakfast. There’s a fairly sensitive brownness control, and if you don’t feel like fussing with it, an ordinary lever on the side lets you use it like a normal toaster.

If you know somebody else who has a Toasteroid, you can send them a private message via toast. Presumably, the app will prompt them to stick a piece of bread into their own toaster so they can receive it. The makers also note that you can leave yourself or a loved one a reminder that’s hard to ignore – at least, until you stuff it into your mouth. Probably the most useful function is pleasing picky kids who demand that their favorite cartoon characters be visible on every conceivable surface.

If you’re still asking why, Toasteroid is ready with an answer: “Because why not.” Sure, not everything in our homes should be a needlessly complicated smart gadget, but the Toasteroid does have all the same functions as any high-end toaster and costs less than a lot of them if you get in on the pre-sale. 

Would you walk up to a gallery wall made entirely of sweet-smelling dark chocolate and lick it, Willy Wonka style? These 13 (more!) edible art creations use colorful candies, tomatoes, croissants, Kool-Aid, Jello and other food items to build everything from recreations of Mondrian paintings to massive carpets stretching across entire city blocks.

Candy Carpet in Chengdu, China

The ‘Sweet as One‘ exhibition in Chengdu, China took up nearly 14,000 square feet with a colorful expanse of candy measuring 607 feet long by 23 feet wide. 2,000 volunteers spent five days hand-pouring 13 tons of sweets into smalls quarries to create a quilt-like patterned artwork filled with flowers and panda bear faces.

Edible Chocolate LEGO Bricks

Precise molds make it possible to create and stack tiny chocolate LEGO bricks into whatever you can dream up in this fun project by illustrator and designer Akihiro Mizuuchi.

Edible Furniture by Lanzavecchia and Wai

Edible elements like hard candy, coffee, chocolate and grains create table and chair surfaces on top of metal support structures in a series of four conceptual designs by Studio Lanzavecchia + Wai. “The domestic landscape reflects our culture, our taste and our habits,” say the designers. “The objects that populate it absorb the atmosphere that pervades the space through their physicality, functionality and identity. Ostensibly living intact through good times and also adverse ones,t he domestic objects become invisible to us over time with their familiarity. How can furniture react to times of crisis? The decorative elements that were once appreciated, suddenly become superfluous and should evolve to reflect a new era of austerity; the objects become edible and offer themselves to be consumed when needed.”

Edible Versions of Art Masterpieces

The Art Fund challenged art lovers and designers to recreate famous artworks using edible materials, like a Mondrian-inspired slice of cake and a marshmallow treat version of Jackson Pollock’s ‘Autumn Rhythm (No. 30).’ Say the coordinators, “We’re hoping to inspire people, through the medium of food, to raise money for our national museums and galleries. What could be more fun than recreating your favorite work of art out of simple ingredients you have in your fridge – which you can then eat!”

Brunch-Based Cityscapes

Brunch City is a collaboration between illustrator Bea Crespo and photographer Andrea G. Portoles, using food as a medium to create architectural landscapes relating to the culture and character of particular cities. The series depicts Barcelona, Athens, Paris, Tokyo, London, Rome and more.

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Candy Carpets And Chocolate Skulls 13 Edible Designs

Imagine reading a recipe, mixing up your ingredients, placing the recipe page in a pan with some tomato sauce and cheese, baking it and then consuming it with relish. It’s not a likely scenario unless you have pica, a disorder that causes people to eat non-food substances like paper – or you’ve gotten your hands onto ‘The Real Cookbook’ by Korefe.

Reminiscent of British artist Anna Garforth’s edible typography, which consists of cookies carefully cut into typographic works of art, the cookbook is made of sheets of fresh pasta printed with recipes in German. Each sheet is designed like a poster, both informative and beautiful to look at.

Once the recipe is put together, the sheet of pasta is placed on top, creating a classic lasagna.

The Real Cookbook was designed as a special project for a large publishing house, and is not available for sale, but if you’re crafty you could possibly DIY your own version with a large stamp and just-slightly-defrosted frozen sheets of pasta.