“Nanofood” prospects: 40-60% change by 2015
Helmut Kaiser, a consultancy based in Germany, has bravely published a study on Nanotechnology in Food and Food Processing Industry Worldwide 2003-2006-2010-2015: "Tomorrow we will design food by shaping molecules and atoms…Molecular technologies are disruptive technologies and change the conventional production faster than most scientists expect. It can make the products cheaper, the production more efficient, more safe and more sustainable using less water and chemicals. Producing less waste and using less energy. The impact for the food industry will be a change of 40 to 60 percent by 2015. The change is dramatic, the potentials are immense and the risks too." The report costs 6900 euros, and we'll be happy to review it if they'll send us a free copy.
February 27th, 2005 at 4:21 PM
Smart food
Beware the coming of smart foods! In not so distant future companies will engineer food to have a host of useful properties. Food could acquire an unbearably bad taste upon its expiration date to prevent hoarding. Food could taste good and have no caloric value whatsoever to let people with no self-control lose weight. Food could become completely digestable and produce no excrement.
But that's not all! Did you ever wish your competitors would go out of business? Well, with smart food engineering you'll be able to get your food to install tiny machines in the eater's taste buds. Then, whenever a product similar to yours enters his mouth, these machines will check for your company's cryptographic signature and, if absent, make the food taste really bad. Then the poor shmuck will have no choice but to buy your product. Is that cool or what?
But why stop there? With the latest nanoengineering technology you can make food that is as addictive as cocaine, but without any effect on the brain. It just has really unpleasant withdrawal symptoms. That'll surely keep them coming back for more!
Smart food can also drastically improve the effectiveness of your marketing. Did you ever want to know which part of the city eats the most of your product? Tag it with special nanotracers and install simple scanning equipment in the city sewers. Since such equipment is easy and cheap to produce, there is no reason why every home shouldn't have one. Wouldn't you like to know exactly who is eating your stuff, when, and where? I thought so.
February 28th, 2005 at 9:44 AM
Re:Smart food
If there's no bulk in the digestive system, it can malfunction by sticking together–painful, dangerous, may require surgery to reverse.
Some of these ideas require technology more advanced than others. Installing machines in taste buds is too far out to even imagine how it would work.
The idea of nanotracers and sewer scanners sounds halfway viable. But I think it would be simpler, lower tech, and maybe less controversial to install RFID tags in the packaging, and scan the dump trucks. Or drive by and scan individual garbage cans.
I can see the court cases now: Class action suit, consumers vs. AdCo: Does the right to privacy prohibit RFID scans of streetside garbage cans by passing vehicles? (I predict AdCo would win.)
Chris
February 28th, 2005 at 10:50 AM
Taste bud hacking
> Installing machines in taste buds is too far out
> to even imagine how it would work.
Taste buds work by pattern matching certain molecular shapes. What you would need is to make a nanomachine that would adhere to the taste bud right above the receptor. The appropriate configuration can be obtained by crawling over a known taste bud with a nano-AFM to obtain a surface map for recognition.
Then you set up your taste bud parasite to act as a repeater. It would have the same receptor on the outer surface as the taste bud itself and would bind the same types of molecules. Then it rotates an appropriate molecule into the taste bud receptor sort of like you rotate microscope objectives. This is a simple transparent parasite that does nothing.
To add selectivity you would need to insert an AND gate or an adder between the outer receptor and the output head. Then you create another surface binding site for your proprietary "key" molecule and connect its output to the other input of the AND. This way taste will only "pass" if the key molecule is also present. If you use an adder you could present a completely different taste from what it's supposed to be.
March 1st, 2005 at 10:31 PM
Nanofood as Nanomedicine, distribution through UN
One of the influencing factors to program the environmental cluster-matters for empowering its intra capsular cluster-matters to perform the programming of its neighboring such units and so on up to the target units, may be by the medicated guiding-food as Nanofood. Since the development and distribution of Nanofood needs absolute regulations, these medicated guiding-food needs to be distributed and marketed only through UN and this will provide one more functionality to UN, that will influence the reduction of economic & social disparities of the globe. This includes the vitamins, minerals and anti-oxidants enriched food also.
January 15th, 2009 at 8:27 AM
You people are evil.