OK, let’s say that some reputable manufacturer of household appliances announces a new device. It’s the size of a standard dishwasher or washer/dryer and plugs into standard appliance outlets. It has a sizable hopper on it in which you feed mulched organic garbage… food scraps, lawn trimming, even sewage. And it breaks that all down and spits out pill-sized pellets. The pellets, in their standard form, are essentially compressed dehydrated “food loaf.” All the nutrition a healthy human could want in an unappetizing form. But you can add the pellets to broth or cans of chicken noodle soup or casseroles or… whatever. You can live on the stuff forever, feeding the machine garbage and *occasionally* packets of trace elements. There is an input panel that allows you to select a *few* alternatives… low-carb, some flavor variants (perhaps based on extra packets) and, perhaps importantly, the option to select “dog food” and “cat food” options, with sub-options for flavor and dietary variants. Assume that while *you* might not necessarily care for the raw product, cats and dogs like it just fine.
Assume further that testing has shown that the appliance works very reliably and safely. You could feed it a sludge of dog barf, e coli, mercury and anthrax and the results would be perfectly safe and healthy. Assume yet further that it doesn’t consume *too* much power, and that it’ll spit out a family’s worth of daily nutrition in, say, an hour of processing.
So… how much would you pay for such a device? $2000? $1000? $500? Even at the high end, if the device lasts as long as most appliances do, it could *quickly* pay for itself… if you are willing to run it often enough. A family with a number of large dogs would probably make their money back quite quickly.
On the other hand: it’s a safe bet that the model five years later would be 1/3 smaller and 1/4 cheaper, with more options. Within a decade the things will probably be able to make *good* food… meat that’s indistinguishable from tuna or chicken or beef.
So what would an “early adopter” price be for such a thing?
