2010 February 25 « Local Nourishment

individually wrapped and padded produce by oceandesetoiles, on Flickr

A recent article over at The Atlantic about food packaging caught my eye. It starts out with the oft-discussed problems of food packaging: how to create a method of food packaging that protects food for longer times, mechanical handling and further transport without creating a nuisance in the landfill or increasing our dependence on fossil fuels. One possible answer, the author poses, is edible food packaging.

The article takes a sharp turn, though, and raises very serious questions about the form this edible packaging will take. Will the American public be made aware that the packaging they are expected to eat contains nanotechnology? Will proper testing take place?

As Geoff Fary, of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, explained on Australian television news, “We just don’t want to take the risk of having these particles released in industry in a fairly unregulated way, only to find that we have reaped an awful harvest 30 years down the track.”

Does all this sound unsettlingly familiar? It should.

Even now, with almost 90 percent of U.S. soy, corn, and cotton grown with genetically modified seeds, skeptics maintain that a creepy technology has been shoved down our throats without proper oversight.

Consider, also, the food safety angle. The more hands processing a food, the more dangerous it tends to be. So your apple leaves the orchard and instead of being shipped to a store distribution center, is sent to a packaging facility. That’s one more step, and several more hours to days of freshness loss. The edible packaging is applied, and the food leaves the processor for the store distribution center. From there, the apple follows the normal course of preparation for sale, with multiple stops and manipulating hands along the way. Even once it reaches the store, unpackers, produce managers and other consumers handle this packaging. And you are going to put that in your mouth? Would you lick the outside of a bread wrapper?

Have you ever heard someone sneeze in a produce department? Okay, the food scientists will say, we’ll add a germ-killer to the packaging. Even if someone sneezes on our food packaging, the germs won’t survive because our super kill-em-all package will render them harmless. Feel better? I don’t. That kill-em-all tech is going into my mouth? My stomach? My gut? What about the good bacteria that lives inside me to help me digest and fight hostile germs? Will that be killed off, too?

Surely, not every food producer will have their own edible packaging facility. This is one more tech that needs to be centralized, thus increasing the danger of terrorism and insecurity to our food supply.

If you hear the caution in my writing, you are hearing correctly. Nanotechnology makes me extremely uncomfortable. Rather than going the route we took with genetically modified foods (that is, “Hey, why not?! Looks good to me!”) to find that we have unleashed a genie into the world we can’t force back into the bottle, we need to approach this new technology with great respect and excessive testing performed by disinterested third parties. That last part is crucial.

In the meantime, while scientists and researchers whose pockets are lined with cash from nanotech companies perform the most possibly skewed testing, throw out negative results and push this new tech into our food, may I offer a suggestion? If you are a long-time reader of this blog, you already know what I’m about to say:

Know your farmer, know your food

Eat food without packaging that you purchase from a source known to you personally. Or, if you’re really a crazed radical (wink, wink), why not try growing your own? Think you don’t have room? How about some inspiration from this Urban Organic Gardener?

I’ll be keeping an eye on the nanotech scene, so drop by again if you’re as fascinated as I!

And if you don’t know why I’m so up-in-arms about nanotech, here are a couple of my past posts on the subject: