Investigating the Potential Benefits, Challenges of Nanotechnology for Food
Despite the early hour, attendees packed the conference room at McCormick Place in Chicago on Sunday, July 18, for the IFT Sunrise Session “Nanoscale Science for Food.” Offering an excellent primer to the field of nanoscience and technology, Rickey Yada, Advanced Foods and Materials Network, University of Guelph, started his discussion with some history on nanotechnology. As he explained, the creation of the word/field to many seems relatively new. However, the concept is old. Scientists have been studying “nanoscience” phenomena for more than a century. Louis Pasteur’s work with spoilage bacteria (1866), Watson and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA (1953), can be considered nanoscience as well as Richard Smalley’s research on buckyballs (1996) and, in fact, each represent major milestones in the “science of small.”
Nanotechnology is often generally defined as any technology dealing with objects within the 1–100 nm range. But without having a sense of what kind of objects are 1–100 nm long, many people have a difficult time relating to this length scale. Yada says it is helpful when trying to explain the concept of nanotechnology to people not involved in the science to use a visual display of nanosized natural and manufactured objects, so that consumers and the public can see descriptive objects in relationship to the length scale. For example, nanomaterials exist naturally in the form of casein proteins found in milk.
After giving a brief background on the field, Yada moved onto discussing the economic impact of nanotechnology, saying that the nano agriculture and food market is expected to have a staggering economic impact of $20 billion in 2010. Taking a look at the list of top 10 challenges that the world faces over the next 50 years, including energy, water, sustainability, and food, Yada explained that they can all be looked at through the eye of nanotechnology.
“We are faced with a huge population crisis,” said Yada. “In 2050, there will be 9 to 10 billion people on the planet. How do we ensure potable water and food sustainability for them all? Will nanotechnology be a solution? Yes, it will probably be one of the solutions for meeting these needs.”
Solving these more interesting problems will require coordinated, interdisciplinary efforts among food engineers, food chemists, food microbiologists, and others.
Yada thinks there are great potential benefits to be had for the food industry from the use of nanotechnology. In food packaging some of these benefits are improved safety of products, quality, functionality, conductivity, mechanical strength, and thermal stability, just to name a few. In addition, we are beginning to hear more and more about “smart” packaging, in which the package signals environmental changes in the product itself. Nanotechnology is sure to play a key role in the development of such packaging. Nanotechnology can also have beneficial implications for areas such as food safety, agriculture, and health.
“Nanotechnology has been called a molecular revolution—innovation so profound it will allow us to rebuild our world molecule by molecule. The unprecedented benefits of such control over matter have the potential to permeate every aspect of our lives. But so do the risks.”
—Hilary Thomson, 2008
Yada ended his presentation with this quote from Thomson. He noted that there are several issues about the consequences of nanotechnology that will need to be addressed in order to alleviate consumer concerns. Its introduction must be transparent and the public has to be educated. Most importantly, it is key to talk about the risks involved in using nanotechnology to ensure that the consumer has a safe product.
Bernadene Magnuson, Cantox Health Sciences International, picked up where Yada left off with a discussion of the risks of nanotechnology and the procedure for assessing the safety of nanomaterials. Magnuson also spoke on the subject at the fifth IFT International Food Nanoscience Conference, which took place Saturday, July 17, just prior to opening of the IFT Annual Meeting & Food Expo®. To read more about her view of the challenges in determining the validity and objectivity of nanoparticle safety studies, read “Challenges for evaluating the safety of food nanomaterials.”