Since I just thought about a personal kitchen vending machine, I wondered how it would work.
Storing food in a personal space comes with regular maintenance of it, which means someone would need to enter ones Appartment. That doesn’t sound nice to me.
If the food is stored in one place and from there delivered to the personal kitchen vending machines, no one would need to enter the personal space to refill.
How would it be delivered then? Just dropping it from the top of the building might break things. Maybe some small food elevator in the wall?
Well, without the idea of a “replicator” that can just make stuff on demand from generic fuel of some sort, it would definitely have to be stocked by someone. Perhaps a requirement could be that the vending machine would have to be placed on an outside wall so that the loading could be done from outside the dwelling by going through the access point on the exterior wall, without requiring someone to enter the premises.
Or, if it was some sort of auto-loading mechanism, then I would think that all the personal vending machines would have to be located around the central delivery trunk, much like all the plumbing in a house or apartment building is designed around the “wet wall” where all the pipes come up in a central location. Then maybe each vending machine’s content in its entirety (like the whole “basket” of items) gets cycled through and loaded from a central location that is outside the dwelling?
An alternative idea would be that maybe instead of a traditional vending machine or automat idea, it would be more like those conveyor belt things like you see in some sushi restaurants, or like dim sum where items just periodically cycle by through the whole building and you take what you want and just pay for what you take.
Interesting idea to think through from a practical perspective, though! Application and day-to-day practicality is the main thing that kills most new technological ideas.
i guess the cynical dystopian way would be to have the stock delivered every x weeks for free in drm locked packaging, at which point the packaging from the old stock would automatically render the food inedible. after that you have to stock the machine yourself.
