Small Bites, Bigger Questions

Inside a laboratory in College Station, Tex., Jaime Grunlan and his students are building a new way to keep food fresh, brick by super-tiny brick.

Using clay and biodegradable, food-safe polymers, they’re making what are effectively walls on an atomic scale.

At a basic level, oxygen is what makes food spoil. The packages that envelop food products from potato chips to orange juice are designed to keep air out, so the Holy Grail is something that’s impermeable to air.

Enter clay, which are the bricks in the wall, and the polymer, which serves as the mortar. Air has to flow into a crevice to get around the barrier, and meets another blockade.

This is what nanotechnology can do for food, says Grunlan, a professor at Texas A&M University.

Unlike the ongoing debates over genetically-modified foods, pesticides and industrial farming, however, the migration of nanomaterials into the food supply is happening quietly, and largely in the dark.

“It’s like nano plates of glass, almost,” he said. “It takes what’s called a tortuous path, a painful, long path to work its way through the film.”

The polymer Grunlan uses is made of chitosan, which comes from the shells of shrimp and other crustaceans. The clay, he said, is “just dirt.” The result is a thin film that isn’t just better at protecting food, but is much more sustainable than standard plastic wraps, he said.

When it can be commercially produced, the film promises to be big business in an industry that’s fighting to meet the longevity demands of a hungry world. Grunlan is already fielding calls from companies looking to capitalize on his work.

“I’ve probably been contacted by every famous food snack maker in the United States and had serious conversations with them,” he said. “Just about everybody is interested.”

Newfangled super-small particles are already cropping up across the spectrum of consumer and industrial products, from sunscreens to tennis rackets. A smaller, and lesser-known, area of the booming nanotechnology industry is focused on what we eat, and how it’s handled.

The federal government — the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and to some extent the Environmental Protection Agency — has essentially no specific policy on nanomaterials and food, either in edibles or in packaging. While there are efforts to bring nano-related food products under the regulatory umbrella, it’s anybody’s guess as to how long that will take, or whether the guidelines will have any real teeth.

Meanwhile, research and development are racing ahead, producing things like ​“killer paper” impregnated with nanosilver to kill bacteria, or Grunlan’s nanoclay film.

Whether some of these breakthroughs pose a threat to people, animals or the environment is another matter. That’s part of a much broader question, one that, in many ways, science simply can’t answer right now.

Nanotechnology leverages the often amazing properties of super-small engineered particles (a nanometer is a billionth of a meter). These tiny materials can make airplane wings stronger, through the introduction of nearly weightless carbon nanotubes, or make exterior paint self-cleaning with nano-titanium dioxide. Shrinking these materials, however, sometimes changes the way they interact with the world around them, raising serious questions about their impact on health and the environment.

Toxicologists around the world are trying to figure out what’s dangerous and what’s not, as governments grapple with how to proceed. But the pace of innovation may outstrip efforts to promote safety.

Consumer advocates and researchers say consumers need to be skeptical in this environment, with so little information available, especially from the companies working to invent the latest nano-food breakthrough.

“There’s a lot of research going on, but on the development side it’s becoming somewhat lost in somewhat of a black box,” said Jennifer Kuzma, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. She’s studied nano food, as well as public attitudes toward nanotechnology and other emerging technologies, including genetically-modified organisms, or GMOs.

Initially, she said, companies such as Kraft touted their nano-related development projects. But in recent years, as the battle over GMOs has reached a higher pitch, industry has become more wary of advertising its use of another potentially game-changing technology. At the same time, she said, scientists examining the potential risks of all kinds of nanomaterials haven’t done a great job of converting their lab findings into practical advice.

“You’re seeing the real messiness of risk science but not seeing the synthesis of translation,” Kuzma said.

In survey interviews, she said, people quickly grasp information about the risks and benefits of nanotechnology, she said. But they need help decoding these new materials.

“People want information — they care about where the nanomaterial is, so packaging poses less concern than putting it in the food or on the farm,” Kuzma said. ​“We asked several questions about labeling, and of course people want labels, but they want them to say more than just ​‘nanoparticles.’ They want more information about what’s in there.”

That information could be a long time coming. The FDA has been criticized for years for it weak efforts to push labeling on an assortment of products, from vitamins to sunscreens. When the agency released long-awaited new guidelines for sunblocks last summer, it said almost nothing about nanomaterials. Nano-sized titanium dioxide and zinc oxide have become common in many sunscreens, especially those labeled ​“mineral-based.” There are concerns that these chemicals, which are widely used in a variety of sizes in products as diverse as paint and toothpaste, could cause problems in people or the water supply.

On a broader level, the White House, EPA and FDA released policy papers last summer offering a glimpse at where a potential nano-specific regulatory framework might go. The White House emphasized its intentions to use science to back up regulations, while the EPA suggested several options for gathering more information from manufacturers about what’s going into their products, particularly pesticides. The FDA basically reiterated its intention to treat nanomaterials as new products, rather than derivatives of existing substances that might already have agency approval.

What the documents didn’t include is a timetable. And given the anti-regulation culture that is currently gripping Washington, speed doesn’t seem to be a priority. (The FDA did not respond to requests for comment on this article.)

“I think one of the overriding concerns of both industry and the regulatory agencies is, let’s invent a framework in which neither one of us will be held liable because we can claim that the other is responsible for the safety of the product,” said Steve Suppan, pictured, a senior policy analyst at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a non-profit organization that promotes sustainable food. Suppan authored a report earlier this year examining the regulatory picture for nano-infused food and packaging products.

“I think with foods, there was a period of euphoria about what nanotechnology would do for the food industry, and then they kind of hit the wall in terms of actually being able to provide evidence of the safety of the products,” Suppan said.

One problem is that a lot more money is being spent on development than on safety research. Another is that the safety studies that are done tend to be narrowly focused: for example, dosing a zebrafish embryo with high levels of one nanomaterial might not offer a lot of insight about the impact of a consumer product.

For example, Suppan said, you could probably eat as much nanoclay as you want without any real problem. But nanoclay is almost certainly going to be paired with other super-small substances, such as silica and metallic oxides, in products. And nobody really knows what the interactions might do. He said he’d asked a prominent toxicologist why there weren’t studies looking at the impact of nanoparticles on the gastrointestinal track, which is obviously a hot spot for determining food safety. The answer: those are expensive, and difficult to do.

On the other hand, Suppan said, using nanotechnology to help detect food contamination — in the form of exceptionally small and sensitive monitors — is a potentially low-risk, high-reward application.

“One thing that’s so irritating about nanotechnology is the way it’s marketed is kind of a unified technology, it doesn’t discriminate between trivial and potentially dangerous applications and relatively low-risk applications that could be socially useful,” Suppan said.

Food packaging does seem to be at the forefront right now in terms of development, he said, and it’s a focus of the FDA as well. Packaging may also be the most benign use of nanomaterials, since it seems that substances embedded in packaging are less likely to migrate into the food they’re covering. The FDA is moving more slowly than the EPA, Suppan said, in part because the agency has a much broader authority — over everything from drugs to medical devices to food and cosmetics.

“We’ll get, I think, some indication of just how much well there is to regulate when we see what happens to the response to the EPA guidance,” Suppan said.

The EPA has essentially proposed two ways of collecting the information it wants from manufacturers: one is voluntary, the other mandatory. Industry representatives are urging the agency to adopt the voluntary scheme, while environmental groups and consumer advocates are pushing for the compulsory system. If the EPA bows to industry lobbying to make reporting voluntary, Suppan said, that will be an indicator that the federal government won’t have a particularly strong weapon in overseeing development of nano-products.

Politics, and the economy, play a role, too. Suppan said in conversations with international regulators, they’ve described being hamstrung because politicians have spent time touring factories and touting the potential benefits of nano-enabled products, and have bought into the idea that nanotechnology is a cure-all for ongoing economic woes.

“They’re hoping this is going to save their bacon,” he said. ​“Let’s not investigate health and environmental safety issues too closely, lest we scare off investors.”

It’s not just consumers who need protection, and information.

“My personal view is that the clear and present danger that I should think both industry and government should be concerned about regarding food packaging with nanomaterials is in the manufacturing process itself, and exposure to workers,” Suppan said.

Kuzma said she had been critical in the past of the FDA and EPA for not moving forward, but that she is encouraged by what was released last summer and now has more confidence in the agencies.

“You see these tiny, like baby steps almost,” she said.

She said she’s comfortable with the decision, at least for now, not to nail down a completely specific definition of ​“nanomaterial,” which is the subject of a fierce international debate. But efforts to gather information about what’s going into products needs to be compulsory, she said.

“(This) seems to me to be a sane approach, but it’s not really a mandatory approach now,” she said. ​“It’s not necessarily a bad approach, but I think there needs to be perhaps one more incremental step in that you say, ​‘you must come to us.’‘’

Lynn Bergeson, a lawyer at the Washington firm Bergeson & Campbell who works with nanotechnology companies on navigating the regulatory process, said she too is less critical of the FDA than she might have been in the past. Bergeson said she’s encouraged by the appointment last year of Michael Taylor to be deputy commissioner for food at the agency, and thought the draft guidance issued by the agency last summer reflected a new focus on nano inside the FDA.

Taylor, who authored a report on nanotechnology and food in 2008 for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars’ Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, knows where the gaps are, Bergson said. She called him and another key appointee, Jesse Goodman, ​“nano-smart, nano-savvy and nano-sensitive.”

Whether they — or anyone — can fill those gaps in the current Washington budget environment remains unlikely, she said.

“Nobody …can do much about the very serious shortfall of resources that all of these agencies are enduring now, and will continue to endure,” she said. ​“That’s not a failure of policy and it’s not a failure of commitment, it’s a failure of resources, and it’s not going to improve.”

Bergeson, who also writes a nano-law blog, is a booster of nanotechnology. She’s worked with the American Bar Association and other projects aimed at demystifying the nano world. Her personal opinion, she said, is that industry could be doing more to inform the public as companies develop new nano products and bring them to market, and not just in the food sector.

“We have not done enough to telegraph what these concerns might be, how they are being addressed, and how the commercialization of nanotechnology really should be not a source of tremendous concern,” she said. ​“That public dialogue has really not reached the pitch that it should reach.”

After packaging, Kuzma said she thinks the early frontier in nano-based food products will probably be in the vitamins and supplements area, and in efforts to enhance flavor through engineering. Given the lack of regulation and transparency, she said, people should proceed cautiously.

“What I do as a consumer is, sometimes I hear that something has special new properties and i immediately think nano, so even though it doesn’t have a nano label,” she said.

“If something says, ​‘a new way to deliver vitamins to you,’ or offers orders of magnitude of improvement,” that’s a place where nanomaterials might be inside a product, she said.

Suppan said he suspects that companies would try new ideas first on imported produce and other items, because the U.S. enforcement system is weak in that area. Just as nano-based pesticides, such as nanosilver, expose the broader problems with the laws that EPA uses to govern them, nano food products showcase the already gaping holes in America’s food safety system.

“The technology is not going to fix the regulatory breakdown,” he said.

And despite the assurances of industry that they’re interested in managing the risks of nano products — as much from a business standpoint as a safety one — Suppan remains skeptical. It seems foolish to risk hurting people in order to make creamier ice cream with fewer calories, but many companies seem reluctant to put the money into safety testing, especially if it means exposing flaws in a variety of products.

“That’s a pretty shaky defense of the next industrial revolution,” Suppan said. ​“I am for what is by all accounts supposed to be a revolutionary technology. I just can’t see why they wouldn’t try to ensure the viability of that revolution with really relatively small investments in the regulatory structure and policy. Why not take a couple of years to safety-proof your products?”