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"The best fuzzy rules, the best knowledge, deal with the turning points of the system. If a race-car driver teaches you how to drive, you don't need him to show you how to drive on the straightaway. It's how he handles the curves that matters."
- Bart Kosko

Synthetic Food Dispenser  
  A machine that could make whatever food you wanted from basic elements.  

This is a very early use of the idea of a food synthesizer that could whip up whatever you wanted without needing to grow fruits and vegetables or breed animals for meat.

The restaurant had the food displayed directly, and I made a choice. The food was three hundred thousand years old, I suppose. I didn't know, and the machines that served it to me didn't care, for they made things synthetically, you see, and perfectly.
From Twilight, by John W. Campbell.
Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1934
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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Twilight
  More Ideas and Technology by John W. Campbell
  Tech news articles related to Twilight
  Tech news articles related to works by John W. Campbell

Synthetic Food Dispenser-related news articles:
  - MIT's Cornucopia Digital Robotic Food Concept

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