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 …
MEPS Demand Tougher Nanotech Rules – Again
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 …
Nanotech – the Sucessor to GMO’s?
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 …
Another Boring Swiss Risk Report
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 on Food Safety
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 …
Careful with that Large Hadron Collider, Eugene
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 …