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Engineering Food at the Molecular Level
Krishna Dagli writes to mention a New York Times article about the possibility of manipulating food at a molecular level. Though some of the initial suggestions are a little pointless (lower-fat ice cream, harder-to-melt M&Ms), weighter goals could eventually be achieved here as well. From the article: "Given the uncertainty about the risks of consuming new nano products, many analysts expect near-term investment to focus on novel food processing and packaging technology. That is the niche targeted by Sunny Oh, whose start-up company, OilFresh, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., is marketing a novel device to keep frying oil fresh. OilFresh grinds zeolite, a mineral, into tiny beads averaging 20 nanometers across and coats them with an undisclosed material. Packed into a shelf inside the fryer, the beads interfere with chemical processes that break down the oil or form hydrocarbon clusters, Mr. Oh says. As a result, restaurants can use oil longer and transfer heat to food at lower temperatures, although they still need traditional filters to remove food waste from the oil. Mr. Oh said OilFresh will move beyond restaurants into food processing by the end of the month, when it delivers a 1,000-ton version of the device to a 'midsized potato chip company' that he said did not want to be identified. "
Wouldn't it be better to grow food instead of engineer food? Moore's Law doesn't have to apply to everything.
because the long term effects of synthetic food are not clear and because the companies promoting the stuff are - how to say this diplomatically - less than forthcoming with the downsides, side effects and seem not to understand the meaning of the word 'disclosure'.
I'm all for progress, but food is delicate, mistakes have often serious and sometimes fatal effects. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see that in todays environment a short term financial gain for a corporation will outweigh a long term health risk. Until that trend reverses I'm all for caution.
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In what sense is food 'delicate'? Certainly an industrial product can be toxic, but food is not an exceptional case. In fact, we should expect our bodies to be more tolerant of food and water pollution than of other vectors. After all, you've got a million years of evolution behind you, ensuring that your gullet can tolerate the half-rotted carcass you found lying on the jungle floor.
I'd bet that 99.99% of food-related fatalities over the past 30 years have been due to natural pathogens (or choking). Care for some organic spinach?
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Food poses a larger threat because we expect interact with it so closely. There are plenty of toxic chemicals around the house, but for the most part we don't expect to place them directly into our bodies.
But none of those million years were we exposed to some of the chemicals/proteins/etc that are being geneticly engineered into foods. Although I think the outrage of some against bioengineered food is unjustified, there are definately risks that need to be thoroughly evaluated.
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It's not like food has been statically unchanged over the last several thousand years, or even several hundred years. We've been using selective breeding techniques ever since we started agriculture. Do you think that chicken you're eating is like the original un-domesticated version that came from the wild? Is the corn, wheat, tomatoes, etc the same as it was 2000 years ago, or even 200 years ago?
Rejecting GM, processed, or whatever food with broad strokes doesn't make any sense. We've been changing our food for a long long time, so you really shouldn't be eating anything that society (modern or non-modern) produces at all. If you want "purity before human intervention" you should go back to the hunter-gatherer society, just be carefull not to gather anything that's reproduced with human-interferred stuff.
That's not to say that you shouldn't be concerned with food additives, GM foods, etc. It's just a matter of making sure it's all safe rather than rejecting it all out of hand.
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Not everything else improves. Music CD technology came out and eventually killed dynamic range. Digital cable came out and we lost the ability to flip quickly through channels. Wide screen TV's came out and now everyone watches their favorite shows with all the actors' faces all stretched.
In medicine, you can say we've made progress, but now we have doctors over-recommending surgery for basic conditions. And psychiatrists prescribing Paxil and SSRI's to anyone who feels a little stressed.
This may be the worst thing I've ever read on Slashdot. Nature is the least efficient way of making food? Look at the way a seed turns into a plant which gives us fruit. Or look at how any animal comes into being. A damn egg turns into a live chicken. Nature does all of these things without following a single blueprint. And you call it inefficient?