Canada has become the latest country following the UK and Australia to ban nanotechnology in organic food. Dag Falck, organic program manager at Nature’s Path Foods explains:

“Genetic engineering is a definable science: splicing genes into crops. With nanotechnology there are at least 1000 different applications, all unregulated with unknown risks.”

As the Canadian organic folks don’t seem to have got around to actually defining what nanotechnology is yet, one suspects that they are rather jumping the gun. It is rather confusing though as FoE, to their credit admit.

Homogenizing milk and grain milling create nanosized particles—milk molecules and wheat flour dust—but would not be considered products of nanotechnology….Nano Green Sciences, Inc. sells a nano-pesticide that they claim is “organic.” Other natural pesticides, such as pyrethrin and copper, could contain nanoparticles and nanosilver could be used to clean vegetables of bacteria.

I wouldn’t claim to be an expert on organic food regulation, but I was rather under the impression that ‘organic’ simply meant free from anything ‘artificial,’ as we discussed  when the UK Soil Association also banned all things nano. It would seem that the natural/man made division would catch all engineered nanomaterials anyway, so explicitly banning them is as much a waste of time as banning cloned sheep from being in organic pigeons or grasshoppers from dancing on the moon.

More sabre rattling from the the European Parliament who passed a “non binding opinion” with 391 votes in favour and three against, demanding that all nanomaterials should be considered as new substances, and that existing legislation does not take into account the risks associated with nanotechnology.They also demanded that consumer products containing nanomaterials must be labelled ‘nano’.

It’s a repeat of the techniques used by anti technology lobbies and is  a very effective strategy that goes something like this:

1. Find some evidence that something is dangerous – note that it doesn’t matter if 99.99% of research shows no dangers, parliamentarians are not scientists and it’s unlikely that they will ever check
2. Find a few more scientific papers and deliberately misinterpret them in order to back up your agenda
3. Use this ‘scientific evidence’ to ‘prove’ that the technology is dangerous – if it turns out you were wrong just ignore any evidence to the contrary and stick to your story
4. Once you have sown the idea that a technology is dangerous, call for labelling in an attempt to use public ignorance of science to keep products off the market.

The flaw in this argument is that it only works for things that people might eat or drink, so sticking a “contains nanotech” label on a mobile phone or solar panel won’t have any impact. I sometimes wonder whether groups who try to confuse nanotechnology with GMOs are deliberately trying to confuse the issues to spread fear, or whether they are simply too stupid to tell the difference between various bits of science and spend all day trying to connect their washing machines to the Internet while trying to make phone calls with a plastic chair.

I spent the weekend in Paris enjoying delicacies such as “os a moelle” and eating couscous at Au Rendezvous, a Tunisian restaurant so fashionable that Jacques Chirac was at the next table, but came home to find a great deal of tweeting and blogging about nanotechnology & food (again).

It struck me as odd that in Paris cracking open a couple of beef shin bones and spreading the marrow on a bit of toast (os a moelle) is a perfectly normal thing to do, whereas most people in the UK wouldn’t dream of eating such a thing. On the other hand, many people in the UK are quite happy to eat at McDonalds and KFC but won’t touch GMO’s. There’s obviously nothing rational about attitudes to food.

Strangely, we now have government environment ministers hyping up the possibilities of the use of nanotechnologies in food, although I was a little concerned to see that the Observer summed up nanotechnology thus:

Nanotechnology is increasingly being seen as a successor to genetically modified (GM) techniques in food production, with GM trials meeting consumer resistance and sabotage by activists.

There must be something in the water in Switzerland this year. Hot on the heels of the International Risk Governance Council‘s rather pointless report comes another missive from TA-Swiss (Schweizerische Akademie der Technischen Wissenschaften) looking at nanofood.

The TA-SWISS study concludes that people with certain “nutritional styles” could actually be open minded about food containing additives produced by nanotechnology. Even more so if we assume that nanofoods might be easier to manage and/or could have added health benefits. In developing countries, such additives could help to combat malnutrition; for example, by fortifying basic foods with iron, zinc, vitamin A or folic acid. It must, however, be taken into account that such products must also be affordable and accessible to the demographic groups that need them.

I’m not sure whether to yawn or gnash my teeth at this point – doing both might result in another trip to the dentist so I’ll just curse softly.  Why do people waste time putting out this kind of tedious, derivative and inconclusive research? Is the credit crunch already affecting the supply of scientific insight and creativity?

Everybody from Australia to Europe seems to be launching consultations on nanotechnology and food, mainly because there is no clear distinction between naturally occurring nanostructures and those artificially added.

Richard Jones does his usual erudite job of framing the issue here but I have to wonder whether this is just more quangos wasting more time and public money. Rather than attempting to focus on the ‘nano’ aspect, wouldn’t it be better to just focus on the ‘safety’ aspect?

The Irish Times reports on a report by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) who have decided that “Food nanotechnology involves the use of tiny particles (nanoparticles) which can be 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, to modify processed food.”

While the FSAI admit that no foods currently on the Irish market use nanotechnology, they still recommend that “policies should be devised now in advance of their arrival”. Their report also calls for “a EU-wide legislative framework to regulate the use of nanotechnology in food, including the introduction of mandatory labelling. A national list of products containing nanoparticles should be compiled and monitored by the FSAI.”

It’s nice to know that government agencies around the world are busy worrying about, and compiling lists of things that may never happen, and recommending that we set up task forces and monitoring systems just in case they ever run out of work to do. I suppose the major problem is that nanotechnologies have been successfully confused with GMOs by a number of NGOs in the minds of various regulatory authorities.

Confusing a totally different technology with a technology that people are already confused about is always a good strategy, and regulators in Europe will invoke the precautionary principle quicker than you can say “careful with that Large Hadron Collider, Eugene.”