Having taken a swipe at media spin a few days ago, it’s good to finish the week flagging up a bit of media sense – no prizes for guessing it comes from New Scientist. Its editorial joins the chorus for more openness and honesty in discussions about nanofoods, particularly from the companies developing them.
New Scientist warns, as we have, that the food industry is jeopardising the future of nanofoods by failing to trust consumers with the scientific facts as we currently know them. If this is relatively new territory, I’d steer you to our latest issue of Bite, which is devoted to nanofoods, then to the excellent Lords Select Committee report Nanotechnologies and Food and the government response. The response tasks the FSA with ensuring there is open dialogue and clear, accessible information for consumers, and we’ll pick up the pace on this with the new coalition government.
There’s also an interesting point well made in the New Scientist editorial about the emphasis on size when categorising a branch of science, as is happening with nanotechnologies. I was reading about the giant bowl of hummus that has just reclaimed the Guinness World Record for Lebanon and it struck me that we don’t refer to processing individual chickpeas as ‘millitechnology,’ so why ‘nanotechology’ for any and all particles that fall into the nanoscale, and which can range in diameter over three orders of magnitude?
The nanotechnologies brand is helpful for focusing attention, but it is a rather simplistic term that covers a wide range of very different functions, processes and products, which are all put at risk if the 'brand' is tarnished by a lack of trust.
Is it time to focus less on the nanotechnology 'brand' and more on individual functions, properties and uses of nanotechnologies?