Researchers at MIT's Tangible Media Group have brought the ethos of flat-packing to food, creating pasta shapes that go from two-dimensional to three-dimensional when dunked in water.

The "programmable pasta" has gelatine mixed in with the starch. Gelatine naturally expands upon absorbing water, giving the researchers a way to manipulate the foodstuff.
As with flat-pack furniture, the main benefit of the invention would be to save money on food shipping costs.
By having macaroni that stores flat instead of in its individual curls, for instance, distributors could fit a greater amount of the food into the same space, while still allowing the end user to eat a textured, three-dimensional meal.

"We did some simple calculations, such as for macaroni pasta, and even if you pack it perfectly, you still will end up with 67 per cent of the volume as air," said Wen Wang, one of the team's research scientists. "We thought maybe in the future our shape-changing food could be packed flat and save space."
The Tangible Media Group is a part of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The Media Lab works at the intersection of technology, multimedia, sciences, art and design.

Wang led the project, titled Transformative Appetite, together with Lining Yao. They were backed up by research from Chin-Yi Cheng, Daniel Levine, Teng Zhang and Hiroshi Ishii, who heads the Tangible Media Group.
The researchers are able to control the shapes ...