Homaro Cantu, the chef at Chicago’s Moto restaurant, makes dishes by printing flavored inks onto edible sheets of “paper” and combining this papercraft food with elements cooked from the inside out with lasers. He also plans to levitate meals “using superconductors and handheld ion particle guns.”

The printouts are flavoured by dipping them in a powder of dehydrated soy sauce, squash, sugar, vegetables or sour cream, and then they are frozen, baked or fried.

The most common printed dish at Moto is the menu. It can literally whet your appetite by providing a taste test of what’s on the menu: tear off and eat a picture of a cow and it will taste like filet mignon. Once you are done with your sampling, the menu can be torn up and thrown into a bowl of soup - but only once you’ve ordered your two-dimensional sushi which consists of photos of maki rolls sprinkled on the back with soy and seaweed flavouring.

Perspective: Make your product or service so unique that people can’t help but talk about it