27 June ’23


In the summer of 2003, when I was 3 years old, my teacher at school asked me to draw what I wanted to be when I grew up

Without a doubt in my mind I told her I wanted to be a spy & a cook - she looked at me confused and I went on to draw it

Time went by and at 13 I fell in love with product design, so I ended up studying mechanical engineering in university instead

In the summer of 2021, when I was 21 years old, I joined a robotics research lab to build a ’food 3D printer’

As chance would have it, that summer my mum unexpectedly found my drawing from 2003 and she shared it with me

She joked that building a food 3D printer, essentially a ’digital cook’, was as close as I’d been to following my 3-year-old self’s dream

Although it was meant as a joke, my drawing got me deeply thinking about what I wanted to do now that I was ’grown up’

I had been enjoying my work that summer more than any other project before and, when I thought about it, I recognised it was because it involved food

To me, food represents home - growing up in Spain, I learnt that a lightly salted slice of ripe tomato has the same value as a steak; and that although food is important, it’s the people you share it with that is way more so

Food also fascinates me because it combines science and art, it is a need but often can feel like a luxury, and it is arguably as fundamental to culture as culture is to food

That summer I decided that I was going to use my skills in design & engineering to help solve the (what I soon realised were many) problems with the food industry

I also took away the lesson that often times we are very wise at 3 years old

I replied to my mum saying that I was going to follow my dreams of 2003 by continuing to work with food - and I joked that whether I’d become a spy or not she’d never know ;)

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