The Dystopian Future of Food: How Close Will Reality Be to Science Fiction?BY ALICE BARSKY

Food is cheaper than it’s ever been—Americans only spend about 10 percent of their disposable income on food—and there seems to be plenty to go around. That seems like good news for the future of food in America, but statistics paint a different, more dismal, picture. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are overweight or obese, and one in three people in this country will develop diabetes. Only two percent of harvested acreage in the United States is dedicated to producing vegetables. The proliferation of corn and soy farming due to federal subsidies has flooded the American grocery store with processed foods to the point where many families cannot even access fruits and vegetables, and the result is that 23.5 million people live in food deserts (usually poor, urban or rural areas where there are few grocery stores with fresh food). 48.1 million Americans live in food insecure households. Looking at these statistics, the future of food in America starts to look more like a dystopian sci-fi film than the land of plenty.

Post-apocalyptic literature and film often grapple with the idea of food shortages, but reading the nonfiction works of Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle and the like make it seem like these doomsdays depictions may be closer to reality than fantasy. Margaret Atwood, author of award-winning dystopian novels like The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, rejects the idea that her work is science fiction, telling The Guardian, “Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen. For me, the science fiction label belongs on books with things in them that we can’t yet do…. speculative fiction means a work that employs the means already to hand and that takes place on Planet Earth.”Some argue that Atwood and other’s work would fall into the subcategory of science fiction “social science fiction.” Social fiction places more emphasis on the speculation about human society rather than on the nitty-gritty details of the post-apocalypse. It absorbs and discusses anthropology, contemplating the impact of the utopian, dystopian, alternative universe on human behavior and interactions, often making social commentary on our current behaviors, values, or ethics.

Are the food-related, dystopian stories of literature and film closer to speculative fiction than science fiction? How likely is it that the plots of our favorite sci-fi—or, ahem, spec-fi—will unfold in the future? And, most importantly, how accurate are the embedded

social commentaries in such media?

“Soylent Green is people!”

“The act of eating is a task that technology can make more efficient—

or eliminate entirely” is not a line out of science fiction; it is a quote from Rob Rhinehart, creator of a liquid food substitute called Soylent. The name is a cheeky reference to the 1973 film Soylent Green, starring Charlton Heston as an investigator who discovers that the company monopolizing the world’s manufacture of food substitute uses human flesh as a main ingredient. (Rhinehart’s investors—and mom—have advised him to change the name of his own, non-fiction product.)The idea of meal replacement has been around for centuries. The Greeks dreamed of ambrosia, “the food of the gods,” that would grant immortality to its consumer. In the Book of Exodus, the Israelites sustained themselves on manna, “a layer of flakes like frost on the ground,” which Yahweh provided to them as they journeyed through the desert to escape their lives of slavery in Egypt. In the 19th century, Victorians wrote of a meal in a pill. In popular culture, The Jetsons ate food pills that produced delicious taste sensations (but sometimes indigestion), and in Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, a character keeps several weeks’ worth of food pills in a matchbox.The idea behind Soylent is not to replace all meals entirely—just the day-to-day, quick-prep sustenance that many turn to junk food for. Soylent is your daily nourishment, and what Rhinehart calls “recreational food” is just for social occasions. His design was inspired by the busy working bachelor, but recognizes its potential to serve the 48.1 million that go hungry in the U.S. Rhinehart means to tap into both our Western fast-paced culture and a growing rejection of processed and fast foods.

Movements like Slow Food argue that the prevalence of fast food is contributing to the destruction of food culture. Soylent doesn’t destroy food culture; it eliminates it entirely. But what would the world look like if we all ate the same thing? So much of our lives and culture revolves around food—how it is prepared, when and where it is eaten, and regional palette preferences. Imagine a world without the rich, spiced tandoori masala of Northern India, perfectly crisp tomatoes on a Neapolitan-style margherita pizza, or the Ethiopian stew shiroserved on sour and spongy injera flatbread.Maybe it’s just because of its unfortunate name, but the new product, Soylent, seems less like a practical solution for busy professionals than a creepy 21st century reminder of the food wafers distributed to starving masses in the movie Soylent Green. However, that nutritional wafer wasn’t a carefully crafted combination of essential molecules and minerals. After the investigation of the disappearance of an older man, Heston’s Detective Thorn makes a desperate revelation. “You’ve gotta tell ‘em! Soylent Green is people!” The threat of resource depletion and food shortage is a common plot driver for dystopian fiction, and the horrifying final solution is often, as it was in Soylent Green, cannibalism.“Infants’ flesh will be in season throughout the year.”

Although there have been isolated, albeit numerous, instances of real-world cannibalism, our current moral and ethical values are not, uh, advanced enough for this to be one of the more likely sci-fi plots to unfold as a future of food. But for the sake of pop culture, let’s indulge.

In 1729, Jonathan Swift anonymously wrote “A Modest Proposal,” a satirical recommendation to poor Irish families to sell their children as food for the wealthy. This work of social science satire comments on the mercantilism of the 18th century, labor conditions including child labor laws (or lack there of), and the stark income disparity in Ireland (Swift himself was Irish).

The Propagation of Swines Flesh, and Improvement in the Art of making good Bacon, so much wanted among us by the great destruction of Pigs, too frequent at our Tables, which are no way comparable in Taste, or Magnificence to a well grown, fat Yearling Child, which Roasted whole will make a considerable Figure at a Lord Mayor’s Feast, or any other Publick Entertainment.

Returning to the world of fiction, the 1991 film Delicatessen is set in a dilapidated apartment building in post-apocalyptic France, where food is in short supply. The resident butcher advertises for work to lure in victims to slaughter and sell to the tenants as cheap meat. In The Matrix, humans are grown synthetically in pods and fed the liquefied remains of other humans, pumped in through umbilical cords.Back to reality, human cannibalism may be almost entirely confined to fiction (and the occasional serial killer or remote tribe in Papua New Guinea), but the degradation of animals’ dignity in modern-day factory farms has included forced acts of cannibalism. The outbreaks of mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, in the early 21st century was the result of cattle being fed the remains of other cattle. Eight variations of this disease exist among human cannibals as well. 2013’s horror film We Are What We Are sensationalized one of these diseases, kuru. The lesson from these human attempts to fatten up our dinner-bound steaks with their own bovine siblings seems to be that cannibalism, in any form, isn’t such a good idea.

Bistro in VitroFrankenmeat: “It’s alive, it’s alive!”

In a 1932 essay, Winston Churchill made predictions about the future. “Fifty years hence we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” He may have missed the mark on the year, but artificial meat is now at the center of discussions of the future of food.

The idea of our meat coming from a laboratory may be a little uncomfortable, but the reality is that our meat today

comes mainly from factories—confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. CAFOs do immense damage to the environment, releasing 14 billion pounds of carbon dioxide and methane gas into the air and accounting for 51 percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions. They have ramifications on public health including Salmonella, Listeria, antibiotic resistance and polluted air and water, affecting those who eat the products, who live nearby, who use the contaminated groundwater and those who work at the plants.

Worse yet may be the excessive cruelty imposed on the cattle, pigs and chickens. Chickens’ beaks are seared, pigs’ tails are docked and cattle’s’ horns are sawed off. Many of the animals are so fattened up they cannot move, and the sows and cows are strapped down to feed their young. The animals experience clear signs of distress, anxiety and fear—most are not properly anesthetized before slaughter.

Besides the inherent yuck factor of “Frankenmeat,” there aren’t many poor side effects. Scientists are experimenting with supplementing omega fatty acids and vitamins into artificial meat. The benefits to the environment, health and the animals—paired with a strategic marketing campaign—could realistically encourage consumers to bring artificial meat into the mainstream. One of the main concerns is cost; although the price continues to decline, synthetic meat could be reserved for the wealthy initially. In the meantime, the Dutch “virtual restaurant”/art project Bistro In Vitro is a playful and perhaps intentionally squirm-inducing series of hypothetical lab-grown meat products ranging from “knitted meat” to the starfish-like “throat tickler.” The whole enterprise calls to mind a sanitized David Cronenburg movie, but its ultimate purpose is to provoke discussions about eating meat in an era when the resources it takes to produce it are compromising the sustainability of life as we know it.

“May the odds be ever in your favor”

From Soylent delivered via an Amazon subscription to the ubiquity of Whole Foods stores to the farm-to-table movement, much of what is touted as the future of food in America already seems accessible only to the well off. Income disparity raises its ugly head. In the Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy, the sheltered, spoiled citizens of the Capital control and exploit the food supply, and the rest of society is left to fight to the death just to escape starvation. In the movieWall-E, humans are soft, lazy and too plump to wear anything but sweat suits. Will America’s real food future be a mash-up of Panem and Wall-E? Rich people lean and fit, able to subscribe to farm-to-table delivery services of the best organic food and poor people growing obese and sick from diabetes, heart disease and a host of metabolic disorders caused by unhealthy (but inexpensive) processed foods?Income inequality in the United States is one of the greatest among industrialized nations. Fifty percent of our population lives in poverty or is low-income. Big agribusiness lauds factory farming as the inexpensive solution to food insecurity, but as the upper class wises up to the health, environmental and humane implications of processed foods, the lower class is left with the nutritional burden. The most dismal future may be one already on its way: a future where the rich can afford to make virtuous, healthy decisions about their food, while the poor can’t afford to make any decisions about their food or about much of anything at all. Federal corn and soy subsidies continue to drive the price of processed foods and factory-fed meat down, and the poor are forced into a bleak cycle of obesity, disease and death.

Maybe it’s time to reconsider Soylent Green.

http://www.pastemagazine.com/

© 2016 Paste Media Group. All Rights Reserved

FutureFestThe Observer

The future of food: insects, GM rice and edible packaging are on the menuAs the global population rises and food prices do too, many scientists are looking for alternatives to traditional foodstuffs

Insects are a far more sustainable source of food than livestock or fish. Photograph: Photomorgana/Corbis

Killian FoxSaturday 15 June 2013 19.01 EDTLast modified on Friday 15 January 201606.07 EST

Eating insects

Two billion people around the world, primarily in south-east Asia and Africa, eat insects – locusts, grasshoppers, spiders, wasps, ants – on a regular basis. Now, with food scarcity a growing threat, efforts are being made to normalize the concept of entomophagy, or the consumption of insects, for the other 5 billion. Last year, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) published a list of more than 1,900 edible species of insects; the EU, meanwhile, offered its member states $3m to research the use of insects in cooking.

Why? Because insects, compared to livestock and fish, are a much more sustainable food source. They are available in abundance: for every human on Earth, there are 40 tons of insects. They have a higher food conversion rate than even our fastest-growing livestock (meaning they need to consume less to produce the same amount of meat) and they emit fewer greenhouse gases. As a fast-food option, which is how people treat them in countries such as Thailand, insects are greatly preferable to the water-guzzling, rainforest-destroying, methane-spewing beef burger. They are nutritious too: rich in protein, low in fat and cholesterol, high in calcium and iron.

That leaves the issue of palatability. Insects are generally viewed with disgust in the west, but attitudes are beginning to change. Thanks to adventurous restaurants –

Copenhagen's Noma has served up ants and fermented grasshoppers – and pioneering organizations such as Ento in London, we are coming to terms with the notion that insects might actually be nice to eat.

Edible packaging

Our current food system is monumentally wasteful. Last January, a report found that almost half of the world's food is thrown away each year. In the UK alone, according to the government's waste adviser, Wrap, we generate 6.6m tonnes of food, drink and packaging waste per annum, at a cost of £5bn.

The fight against waste has thrown up some intriguing solutions.

For Harvard bioengineer David Edwards, the answer to the packaging problem is simple: just eat it. Last year, Edwards launched WikiCells, a company that makes edible packaging for fruit juices, coffee, ice cream and other products. Mimicking the design of a piece of fruit, the packaging consists of a soft skin "entirely comprised of natural food particles held together by nutritive ions" encased in a protective outer layer that is edible or at least biodegradable. Not only are the membranes more environmentally friendly than plastic, they are designed to taste good too.

Other packaging innovations promise to lengthen the shelf life of perishables, which would mean a reduction in food and drink waste. Pepceuticals, a company based in Leicester, is developing an antimicrobial film that it claims "should significantly prevent the deterioration of … fresh meat and save waste".

Food replacement and eco-food innovation

One of the hottest trends attracting investors' in Silicon Valley has a lot to do with our future eating habits. A growing number of young entrepreneurs, driven by ecological as well as profit motives, are seeking to replace resource-hungry foods such as meat with synthetic and plant-based alternatives – and the likes of Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone are giving them financial support.

Their motives are well-founded. With the global population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050, and as western eating habits spread to countries such as China and India, more efficient and environmentally friendly ways are needed to produce protein-rich foods. Imitation meat is not a new concept, but Bay Area innovators, such as Beyond Meat, are making a chicken substitute good enough, they claim, to compete with the real thing. Meanwhile, Hampton Creek Foods, founded by 32-year-old entrepreneur Josh Tetrick, is working on a plant-based replacement for egg yolks to go in muffins, mayonnaise and other sauces.

Augmented-reality kitchens

As the popularity of programs such as MasterChef and Great British Menu indicates, we have become a nation of food enthusiasts. For every budding culinary genius among us, however, there will always be a kitchen klutz who bungles the recipe and burns everything to cinders. What we need, in the view of Japanese computer scientist Yu Suzuki at Kyoto Sangyo University, is a helping hand from technology. Going several steps further than the online how-to video, Suzuki and colleagues have kitted out a

kitchen with ceiling-mounted cameras and projectors that overlay cooking instructions on the ingredients. Detecting the outline of a fish, for example, Suzuki's system will help you fillet it by highlighting where an incision needs to be made.

Meanwhile, Jinna Lei, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, is developing a system that uses depth-sensing cameras to keep track of what the cook is doing. When a mistake is made, the system will prompt the cook to make amends.

While this may sound like good news, some critics believe these innovations will also minimize the basic joys of cooking. Technology writer Evgeny Morozov says: "Such standardization can make our kitchens as exciting as McDonald's franchises."

Enhanced rice

Thirty years ago, scientists announced the creation of the world's first genetically modified plant. The new technology, it was hoped, would increase crop yields worldwide and ease global malnutrition. Since then, the fortunes of GM food have been decidedly mixed. Its uptake has been limited to just a few countries and many of its promises – including, more recently, the hope that GM crops would help reduce climate change emissions – have yet to be realized.

But in spite of continuing resistance to GM food among environmentalists and those wary of the corporations that control it, breakthroughs are expected.

Next year, it is hoped that golden rice – normal rice modified to produce beta-carotene, which the body converts into vitamin A – will be planted by farmers in the Philippines. If successful, golden rice will help counter blindness and other diseases in children in the developing world.

Meanwhile, another series of enhanced rice varieties is being developed using only conventional plant-breeding techniques. Zhikang Li, the Chinese plant breeder behind green super rice, which produces more grain while proving more resistant to droughts, floods and disease, hopes that his innovation will feed an extra 100 million people.

Andoni Aduriz, Morgaine Gaye, Charles Spence and Mike Knowlden will demonstrate ideas of food futures and "techno-emotional cuisine" at the Sunday afternoon session of FutureFest on 29 September

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jun/16/future-of-food-insects-gm-rice-on-the-menu

© 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

MagazineFuture foods: What will we be eating in 20 years' time?By Denise Winterman BBC News Magazine0 July 2012From the section: Magazine

Volatile food prices and a growing population mean we have to rethink what we eat, say food futurologists. So what might we be serving up in 20 years' time?

It's not immediately obvious what links Nasa, the price of meat and brass bands, but all three are playing a part in shaping what we will eat in the future and how we will eat it.Foods we used to eat

In ancient Greece breakfast was bread dipped in wine In ancient Rome they liked garum, a sauce made out of fish entrails and

fermented for a long time in the sun In Tudor times spit-roast dolphin was on the menu Henry VIII's  banquets would include peacock, heron, porpoise and seagull

Why historic food is back on the menuDiscover the way people used to live

Rising food prices, the growing population and environmental concerns are just a few issues that have organisations - including the United Nations and the government - worrying about how we will feed ourselves in the future.

In the UK, meat prices are anticipated to have a huge impact on our diets. Some in the food industry estimate they could double in the next five to seven years, making meat a luxury item.

"In the West many of us have grown up with cheap, abundant meat," says food futurologist Morgaine Gaye.ADVERTISEMENT

"Rising prices mean we are now starting to see the return of meat as a luxury. As a result we are looking for new ways to fill the meat gap." So what will fill such gaps and our stomachs - and how will we eat it?

InsectsInsects, or mini-livestock as they could become known, will become a staple of our diet, says Gaye.It's a win-win situation. Insects provide as much nutritional value as ordinary meat and are a great source of protein, according to researchers at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. They also cost less to raise than cattle, consume less water and do not have much of a carbon footprint. Plus, there are an estimated 1,400 species that are edible to man.Insect nutritional value /100g

Gaye is not talking about bushtucker-style witchetty grubs arriving on a plate near you. Insect burgers and sausages are likely to resemble their meat counterparts.

"Things like crickets and grasshoppers will be ground down and used as an ingredient in things like burgers."

The Dutch government is putting serious money into getting insects into mainstream diets. It recently invested one million euros (£783,000) into research and to prepare legislation governing insect farms.A large chunk of the world's population already eat insects as a regular part of their diet.Caterpillars and locusts are popular in Africa, wasps are a delicacy in Japan, crickets are eaten in Thailand.

But insects will need an image overhaul if they are to become more palatable to the squeamish Europeans and North Americans, says Gaye, who is a member of the Experimental Food Society.

"They will become popular when we get away from the word insects and use something like mini-livestock."

Sonic-enhanced foodIt's well documented how the appearance of food and its smell influence what we eat, but the effect sound has on taste is an expanding area of research. A recent study by scientists at Oxford University found certain tones could make things taste sweeter or more bitter.

"No experience is a single sense experience," says Russell Jones, from sonic branding company Condiment Junkie, who were involved in the study. "So much attention is paid to what food looks like and what it smells like, but sound is just as important."

Lab-grown meatEarlier this year, Dutch scientists successfully produced in-vitro meat, also known as cultured meat. They grew strips of muscle tissue using stem cells taken from cows, which were said to resemble calamari in appearance. They hope to create the world's first "test-tube burger" by the end of the year.

The first scientific paper on lab-grown meat was funded by Nasa, says social scientist Dr Neil Stephens, based at Cardiff University's ESRC Cesagen research centre. It investigated in-vitro meat to see if it was a food astronauts could eat in space.

Ten years on and scientists in the field are now promoting it as a more efficient and environmentally friendly way of putting meat on our plates.A recent study by Oxford University found growing meat in a lab rather than slaughtering animals would significantlyreduce greenhouse gases, along with energy and water use. Production also requires a fraction of the land needed to raise cattle. In addition it could be customised to cut the fat content and add nutrients.

Prof Mark Post, who led the Dutch team of scientists at Maastricht University, says he wants to make lab meat "indistinguishable" from the real stuff, but it could potentially look very different. Stephens, who is studying the debate over in-vitro meat, says there are on-going discussions in the field about what it should look like.

He says the idea of such a product is hard for people to take on board because nothing like it currently exists.

"We simply don't have a category for this type of stuff in our world, we don't know what to make of it," he says. "It is radically different in terms of provenance and product."

How is a hamburger made in a laboratory?Image captionThere are several steps and the procedure starts when muscle stem cells are taken from animals in a biopsy, says Mark Post, who is leading the project at Maastricht University.Image caption

To create these solid muscle fibres, the cultivated muscle cells are affixed to a string of sugar molecules (a "scaffold", pictured) and left to grow between two anchor points. This process occurs largely spontaneously.

Image captionThe cells are left to multiply and then develop into muscle cells (pictured) in a nutritional substance - a "growth medium" - for example algae extract. The cultivated muscle cells bulk up into solid muscle fibres and bundles.Image captionAs the muscle cells grow in size, the tissue is continuously supplied with nutrients. For the small, newly formed muscle strands (pictured), this is achieved by regularly changing the growth medium.

Image captionThe natural consistency of meat must then be recreated by achieving the correct composition of protein and fat tissue. The edible muscle tissue can be ground to create minced meat and, ultimately, a hamburger.

AlgaeAlgae might be at the bottom of the food chain but it could provide a solution to some the world's most complex problems, including food shortages.It can feed humans and animals and can be grown in the ocean, a big bonus with land and fresh water in increasingly short supply, say researchers. Many scientists also say the biofuel derived from algae could help reduce the need for fossil fuels.

SeaweedImage caption Seaweed is a staple food in Asia

There are 10,000 types in the world UK waters hold about 630 species,

but only around 35 have been used in cooking

Worldwide 145 species of red, brown or green seaweed are used as food

Source: Seaweed Health Foundation

Some in the sustainable food industry predict algae farming could become the world's biggest cropping industry. It has long been a staple in Asia and countries including Japan have huge farms. Currently there is no large-scale, commercial farm in the UK, says Dr Craig Rose, executive director of the Seaweed Health Foundation.

"Such farms could easily work in the UK and be very successful. The great thing about seaweed is it grows at a phenomenal rate, it's the fastest growing plant on earth. Its use in the UK is going to rise dramatically."

Like insects, it could be worked into our diet without us really knowing. Scientists at Sheffield Hallam University used seaweed granules to replace salt in bread and processed foods. The granules provide a strong flavour but were low in salt, which is blamed for high blood pressure, strokes and early deaths. They believe the granules could be used to replace salt in supermarket ready meals, sausages and even cheese.

"It's multi-functional," says Gaye. "And many of its properties are only just being explored. It such a big resource that we really haven't tapped into yet."

With 10,000 types of seaweed in the world, including 630 in the UK alone, the taste of each can vary a lot, says Rose.http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18813075 Copyright © 2016 BBC.

Nano futures

Nanotechnology in food: more than a question of tasteUsing nanotechnology in food could potentially reduce wastage and improve people's health, or it could result in our diets coming under corporate control. So which argument is right? Two experts debate the pros and consTim Lang and Frans KampersFriday 26 April 2013 12.46 EDT

I am troubled by the rise of nanotechnology in the food industry. It's being developed far in advance of public awareness. We've been here before: additives, irradiation, and genetic modification were all fixes promoted by industry which came unstuck on public opinion.

Advocates tout nanotechnology as a way to improve food, with technology in control. A different path is what I call "food democracy", where people are engaged in advance. The future is about realigning food with planetary sustainability.

While evidence of current unsustainability has grown, global corporations have been getting more control over food supplies. They say that they are accountable to us at the checkout, but consumers are barely aware of who these companies are, how they work or the scale of their market share. It's some of these companies who will be adding nanoparticles to your food and defining progress in your name.

This tension between food control and food democracy is not new. In the late 18th century, British economist and demographer Thomas Malthus painted a pessimistic picture of the future, where agriculture could not feed a growing population. In doing so, he posed an important question: what is the relationship between people, the planet, and our food supply?

That question is back. Today's European consumer feeds as if we had two or three planets at our disposal; an American eats as if there were four or five. Food is now a major factor in our footprint on the planet.

We waste and consume too much food in developed countries for multiple reasons, including massive oversupply, apparently "cheap" food and a runaway "choice culture". The result is a mismatch between people, food and planet. Politicians are nervous about it, but for decades they've ceded control to the private sector.

We must see nanotechnology for what it is: a technical cul-de-sac. It's another way to ratchet up hidden control in the food system. It's the nanny corporation controlling our mouths – the technology tail wagging the food dog.

How can we unlock this situation? There has to be a rebalancing of the relationship between citizens, state, science and food corporations. In the 21st century, we need to build a food system that has a lower impact on biodiversity, uses less land, and does not contribute to climate change. But we need to be engaged in this transition.

The goal ahead is to help populations eat for health and pleasure but within environmental limits. To do that, we need to recalibrate culture, not introduce another techno-fix.

Consumers need to wise up about nano. Ask yourself: do you really want to eat these invisible ingredients? Can you eat a sustainable diet without them?

Of course! You can adopt a simpler diet featuring more plants and fewer processed foods. And you can encourage politicians to work on your behalf, rather than nudging us down an unnecessary path. Take heart – many in industry are nervous too. The future is up for grabs.

Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University London

Frans Kampers: 'Nanotechnology can make us healthier'

Food is naturally a nanostructured material. Simply boiling an egg causes changes at a scale of mere billionths of a metre, as proteins in the white change shape and tangle together to form a solid. And many processed foods have relied on these sorts of processes for years, long before they were described as nanotechnology. Tomato ketchup, for example, is made from tiny particles dispersed in water, while the fatty grains of powdered coffee creamer are coated with nanoparticles of silica to stop them sticking together.

But now we have the ability to study exactly what happens at that scale, and use that knowledge to design new nanostructures that improve our food.

Take mayonnaise. It contains minuscule droplets of oil surrounded by a sheath of surfactants and embedded in water. By replacing the insides of that oil droplet with water, we can cut the fat content of the mayonnaise by 15% without affecting how it feels or tastes. Another product on the European market was designed to smuggle fat through your stomach and into the small intestine – once there it releases its cargo, triggering a feeling of satiety and helping people to cut their food intake.

Food researchers have also developed nano-sized capsules that can carry vitamins or other supplements added to food. Nutrients that would spoil the taste of a product are made tasteless by encapsulating them – a good way to smuggle more fish oil into your diet, for example. Hospital patients or the elderly, who may be suffering from nutrient deficiencies, could benefit from foods that are specially designed to contain more of the vitamins or minerals that they need.

Nanotechnology can also give us ways to make sure our food is safe – and to cut down on food waste. Sensors embedded in food packaging could warn of chemical or bacterial contamination. These sensors could stop perfectly edible food being thrown away needlessly. Nanostructures on the surface of packets could also help to kill bacteria on contact, extending the lifetime of the food inside.

Some worry that this form of food processing is yet another way to put more power into the hands of large companies. Yet food has never been safer than it is today, and that is largely thanks to the hygiene and sanitation practices followed by those food manufactures. Food processing is now a fact of life – it's a romantic view to think that

we can feed the 7 billion people on this planet with traditional agricultural practices. And as the population grows, so too will the importance of new food technologies.

If you eat a varied diet with plenty of fruit and vegetables, you're unlikely to need what food nanoscience can offer. But many of us do not, or cannot, eat so sensibly – and for those people, nanotechnology can help to produce food that keeps then healthier for longer.

Frans Kampers, co-ordinator of innovative at Wageningen University and Research Centre, the Netherlands

http://www.theguardian.com/what-is-nano/nanotechnology-food-more-than-question-taste © 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited