- Nature Nanotechnology
- (2011)
- doi:10.1038/nnano.2011.193
- Published online
Nanotechnology has the potential to lead to healthier, safer and better tasting foods, and improved food packaging, but the hesitation of the food industry and public fears in some countries about tampering with nature may be holding back the introduction of nanofoods.
Nanotechnology is unusual in that it has been hijacked as a brand name to market various products that have nothing to do with the nanoscale, such as portable music players (iPod Nano), cars (Tata Nano) and computer devices (Logitech nano cordless mouse), whereas products that do contain nanomaterials often avoid reference to the term 'nano'.
In most countries, there is still uncertainty surrounding how the government bodies responsible for consumer product safety will regulate nanomaterials, and this might explain the reluctance of some companies to use the term nano in their marketing.
In most countries, there is still uncertainty surrounding how the government bodies responsible for consumer product safety will regulate nanomaterials, and this might explain the reluctance of some companies to use the term nano in their marketing.
It is also possible that companies fear that they might be targeted by consumer advocacy groups.
However, this reluctance might also reflect general uncertainty over how the public currently views nanoscience or is likely to view it in the future. The lingering possibility that consumers might reject nanotechnology products out of concern about the impact of nanomaterials on human health and the environment is, therefore, likely to be one of the reasons why the commercialization of nanotechnology is not keeping pace with basic research in nanoscience 1.
To combat this uncertainty, dozens of studies have been performed in an effort to understand how members of the public currently view nanoscience, and to elucidate the factors that influence those perceptions, so that public attitudes towards nanotechnology might be improved.
The most notable finding of this collective body of research is that public awareness of nanotechnology remains low2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
A survey in 2009 found that 70% of Americans had heard little or nothing about nanotechnology4, a situation that has not changed appreciably over the past few years4, 6, 8. Even so, public opinion ranges from neutral to cautiously optimistic, with perceived benefits typically outweighing perceived risks2, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12.
Factors found to influence perceptions of nanotechnology are myriad; they include cultural worldview, religiosity, governance philosophy, knowledge and familiarity level, trust (in government, scientists or industry), emotion, age, gender, race/ethnicity, education, general knowledge of/attitude towards science and awareness of previous technology-based controversies. A meta-analysis of studies that probed these and additional variables found to influence risk judgements of nanotechnology has recently been published 6.
Consumer attitudes towards nanotechnology will continue to evolve, and one agent that will drive this change is the mass media.
Laypeople acquire their information about scientific topics primarily from television, newspapers, magazines and online news sites, and one way in which these sources can affect public attitudes towards new and existing technologies is the amplification of consumer risk perceptions through the disproportionate amount of attention that the media pay to controversy 13.
It is, for example, well accepted that the mass media is partly responsible for the erosion of public trust in government regulatory agencies in the UK following a chain of well-publicized food crises in recent decades13, 14, and this has also reduced the willingness of consumers in the rest of Europe to accept foods made from genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
Many in the nanotechnology community worried that this negative media attention would also create an environment of distrust that could foster public opposition to nanotechnology, and indeed, some research has already found that European citizens are generally less willing to embrace nanotechnology than US citizens15.
Correspondingly, several studies have provided evidence that media coverage of nanotechnology has tended to be more negative in Europe than the United States 15, 16, 17.
Consumers' attitudes towards science and new technologies are strongly influenced by how much trust they have in the individuals and organizations responsible for protecting public interests.
A media-catalysed crisis of confidence surrounding a single nanotechnology application or product could easily initiate a chain reaction of events that not only compromises the future marketability of unrelated nanotechnology-based products, but also places a significant burden on the ability of government agencies to regulate them.
The future of nanotechnology is thus only as secure as the public's willingness to accept those applications that are especially vulnerable to dread, fear and other negative emotions, and these applications certainly include nanofoods18, 19.
Therefore, early identification of the key issues that influence the acceptability of nanofoods, followed by actions to address these issues, are required as part of a proactive strategy to ensure the long-term success of beneficial applications across all of nanotechnology.
Fearing the unnatural
Among the types of products that may benefit from nanoscience, foods are unusual in the potency of the emotional connection consumers have with them. Food chemist Peter Belton wrote20 that “acceptability of food is often a matter of how we identify ourselves and our position in society rather than whether the food is physiologically valuable or harmful”. Food is extensively integrated into human courtship and marriage ceremonies21, 22, and is also deeply connected to cultural beliefs, religious rituals, and racial, ethnic, and gender identity23, 24, 25.
Attitudes towards new food technologies, therefore, are often not formed by objective assessments of their sensory characteristics, nutritive value or safety, and they are extremely susceptible to damage by negative emotions and bad publicity20, 26, 27.
Nanocomposite plastics could provide the basis for strong packages with high barriers to oxygen and water vapour; silver and metal oxide nanoparticles are potent antimicrobial agents that can kill foodborne pathogens; nanosensors offer new ways to detect gases, microbes or chemical contaminants in complex food matrices; and nanoencapsulation may help fortify staple foods with essential nutrients.
Despite these potential benefits, however, some studies have suggested that consumers are wary about nanofoods.
For instance, food applications of nanotechnology have one of lowest public acceptance levels in Australia out of all the applications asked about7, and only 7% of Americans would purchase nanofoods without more information on the associated risks of doing so29.
Of these areas, applications of nanotechnology in food packaging are nearest to the market. Reproduced with permission from ref. 28, © 2011 Elsevier Inc.
Research has indicated that some of this wariness may derive from dread of the possible adverse health effects of food and health applications of nanotechnology3.
Furthermore, focus groups have revealed worries that the wealthy will benefit disproportionately from new health applications of nanotechnology30, suggesting that this may be an additional public concern surrounding nanofoods. Admittedly, most studies from which these conclusions are drawn were based on small population sizes or were not otherwise designed to broadly probe public perceptions of nanofoods, and so more opinion research on this topic is sorely needed.
Available data suggest that one of the reasons some people may be hesitant to purchase nanofoods is that the physiological benefits of consumption often cannot be easily experienced31.
Instead, consumers must rely on industry leaders and scientists to convey what the benefits of new food technologies are, and the efficiency of this communication is highly dependent on trust in these individuals27.
Moreover, Siegrist and co-workers have found that trust in the food industry, research scientists and government agencies impacts the perceived benefits of nanotechnology applications in the food sector much more than it influences the perceived risks32, and our willingness to buy a food product containing a nanomaterial depends more on how beneficial the product is believed to be than on what the perceived risks are31. Nevertheless, perceived risks are still a concern because many people have an 'all or none' view of toxicity when it comes to rationalizing potentially hazardous chemicals against dosage and exposure33. This is especially relevant for nanofoods, in which the allegedly risky substance will be directly consumed. The fact that many consumers do not appear to take account of dosage when assessing the risks associated with nanofoods suggests that other important information about food safety might also get 'lost in translation' in exchanges between scientists and consumers.
However, improved communication of risks and benefits alone will not ensure acceptance of nanofoods, because perceptions of naturalness also play an influential role.
Social scientists are still actively researching what constitutes a 'natural' product in the minds of consumers34, yet it is clear that associations with naturalness are almost entirely positive. Moreover, although a connection between naturalness and physical benefits to health and the environment has been demonstrated, a substantial portion of preference for natural foods is ideational — that is, it is based on morals, aesthetics or other cultural/religious factors that are not related to empirical benefits such as nutrition or safety35.
Naturalness is also grounded primarily in the type of process by which a product is made rather than in its actual content36, 37, at least for ethically contentious manipulations34.
For instance, although selective breeding of animals or plants can take years of human intervention and results in genomes that are vastly different from ancestral starting materials, such organisms are rated as far more natural than genetically modified organisms possessing single allele replacements36. This counterintuitive result has been attributed to human fears of the consequences of 'tampering with nature' and a perception that manipulation of life at the molecular level is more obtrusive and less morally acceptable than the same process applied from the top-down and over longer periods of time27, 38. Note that dread from these sources is probably augmented when the perceived unnatural substance is intended to be actively ingested, as it is in the case of a novel food item.
Naturalness heavily influences the types of nanotechnology products likely to be accepted by consumers, and not surprisingly this is particularly relevant for food-related nanoscience applications33. Some evidence suggests that individuals who prefer 'natural' products may be more likely to believe that food-related nanotechnology applications are risky and offer few benefits32. Furthermore, an aversion to nanotechnology products perceived as being unnatural can override even clearly communicated benefit information, as illustrated by a willingness of consumers to forego a health benefit (for example, cancer prevention) associated with eating a dairy product containing nanoparticles, if this product was perceived to be less natural than a nanoparticle-free version39. Naturalness may also explain why food-packaging applications seem to enjoy greater support than nanomaterials added directly to food7, 31, 32, given public aversion to molecular-level manipulation of food and the fact that food packages are often composed of materials that are not natural even in the absence of nanomaterials.
Experts and laypeople assess nanotechnology risks differently3. Thus, some scientists may become frustrated when the public's worries about naturalness or other social issues divert attention away from scientifically grounded efforts to probe the risks that nanofoods pose to human health and the environment. Nevertheless, public acceptability will ultimately depend on what the public perceives the risks of nanofoods to be, irrespective of what scientists determine, and so stakeholders ignore ethical and social concerns at their peril.
The future of nanofoods is therefore critically dependent on food companies and governments being able to use the outputs of scientific risk analyses to guide technological development and commercialization while simultaneously being sensitive to the different kinds of risks that the public is concerned about. Fundamentally, this becomes an issue of communication, one which will be particularly challenging because there are social and cultural factors associated with food that are not usually found in traditional risk-communication frameworks.
What governments are doing
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Nanotechnology could lead to better foods and food packaging, but the food industry has been criticized for being reluctant to talk about nanotechnology.
In an effort to prevent the same kind of communication failures that seriously impeded the adoption of agricultural biotechnology within the food industry, many stakeholders in nanotechnology have been proactive at engaging the public at an early stage of commercial development40, 41.
For instance, the 6th and 7th Framework Programmes in the European Union, and the National Nanotechnology Initiative in the United States, both fund projects to study the social and ethical implications of nanotechnology, and to initiate public engagement exercises.
Moreover, the manner in which interested parties are approaching public engagement about nanotechnology is also changing42.
New risk-management paradigms that seek to include bidirectional communication between the public and other technology stakeholders at multiple stages of the risk analysis and policy evaluation process are becoming increasingly popular43.
The incorporation of 'concern assessments' alongside traditional health and environmental risk assessments is now considered an effective means to ensure that decision-makers account for how the public filters technological risk information through their values, morals and emotions44.
Indeed, numerous researchers in risk research have advocated a tailored or targeted approach to risk management that specifically takes into account the specific risk perceptions, values or cultures of different groups to improve the way in which information about risks and other health-related matters is communicated42, 45, 46, 47, 48.
Given that the public acceptance of nanofoods will be heavily dependent on factors that are not related to perceived toxicological or environmental risks, these new approaches to thinking about risk are likely to become more useful as the public debate over nanotechnology unfolds.
Although nanotechnology-related public engagement and trust-building exercises have so far been cautiously viewed as successes, there continues to be numerous challenges to communicating effectively with the public about nanoscience49, 50.
One of the biggest challenges is the fact that nanotechnology encompasses numerous different areas of science and technology, so public dialogues by necessity offer only superficial treatments of issues that citizens are likely to be concerned about. In this regard, nanotechnology is similar to 'general purpose technologies', such as plastics, and perceived risks and value judgements need to be associated with specific applications rather than nano in general33.
Furthermore, it has been argued that what we think of as 'the public' is also extraordinarily diverse, and that it would be folly to overlook this heterogeneity when formulating approaches to risk communication51. Therefore, engagement exercises that focus on specific product types, industrial sectors or cultural demographics may stand a better chance of exploring public concerns related to that specific area of interest33. Such a targeted approach is particularly important for the food and farming industries, given that technological innovations in these areas have been contentious in the past43.
Although there have been very few food-specific nanotechnology public engagement initiatives, the gradual expansion of the nanofoods market in recent years has prompted government bodies, in particular, to begin acknowledging the value of such activities.
For instance, in 2009, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization stated that government authorities can build trust and contribute to constructive stakeholder dialogues by fostering “greater public confidence through institutional efforts to provide thorough oversight of applications of nanotech in food and packaging that are transparent and allow public involvement”52.
Furthermore, the Nanotechnology Engagement Group, established in 2005 to document results from nanotechnology-related public engagement exercises and funded by the European Union, has recommended that government agencies promote transparency by creating maps to show how responsibilities for the regulation and funding of nanoscience are distributed, and by being open about uncertainties in science and science policy49. The group also urged decision-making bodies to train and mentor staff who can be involved in public engagement activities. The need for government agencies to make existing safety studies more accessible to the general public, while being sensitive to confidential business information, has also been pointed out43.
In line with these recommendations, government bodies in the United States and elsewhere have made a conscious effort to engage the public about nanofoods, primarily by communicating information related to health and environmental safety.
Uncertainties surrounding toxicity and the extent to which nanoparticles incorporated within plastics can migrate into contacted foods or the environment, all constitute scientific data gaps that need to be addressed to improve risk assessments53, 54, 55, 56, and regulatory agencies have pledged to continually update the public on how these risks are being managed.
For example, on its website the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) states that it “recognizes the importance of public engagement in developing a regulatory strategy for products containing nanoscale material and seeks to include the public at all stages of the process,”57 and it subsequently convened a Nanotechnology Task Force to discuss the regulation of nanotechnology products under its jurisdiction (in a process that included two public meetings).
In its final report58, the task force recommended that the FDA “seek public input on the adequacy of FDA's policies and procedures,” provide guidance that “would give affected manufacturers and other interested parties timely information about FDA's expectations, so as to foster predictability in the agency's regulatory processes, thereby enabling innovation and enhancing transparency, while protecting the public health,” and “consider appropriate vehicles for communicating with the public about the use of nanoscale materials in FDA-regulated products”.
The first FDA guidance document, published in draft form in June 2011 (ref. 59), considers whether a FDA-regulated product contains nanomaterials or otherwise involves the use of nanotechnology. Over time, the agency plans to issue more specific guidance tailored to particular products or classes of products.
Similar documents have also been published by the European Food Safety Authority60, and European governments have been active in their efforts to directly communicate with the public about nanofoods. In the UK, for example, in response to a recommendation in a report by the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee18, the Food Standards Agency held the first meeting of the Nanotechnologies and Food Discussion Group on 13 January 2011.
Government bodies have also contributed to public engagement exercises by making resources available to universities and other non-government organizations. In the United States, for instance, the National Institute for Food and Agriculture (NIFA), which is part of the US Department of Agriculture, has funded projects to probe public opinion and study new ways of conducting an efficient dialogue with the public about food and agriculture applications of nanotechnology. One of these grants funds workshops to inform “public knowledge of emerging applications of agrifood nanotechnologies, and inform agrifood policymakers of local-level perceptions of and responses to them, with the overall goal of facilitating more 'socially responsive' agrifood nanotechnologies”.
Researchers funded by a separate NIFA grant plan to produce a series of audio and video programmes related to nanofoods in collaboration with Earth & Sky (a radio show that reaches millions of people daily) that will be broadcast as a part of their regular programming and used in travelling museum exhibits. NIFA's higher education programme also supports curriculum development and graduate fellowship programmes in the area of food nanotechnology, and has also produced multimedia materials on various food- and agriculture-related applications of nanotechnology.
Media matters
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Government agencies have made a conscious effort to engage the public in discussions about nanofoods.
The media has the power to enhance or undermine the efforts by the food industry or governments to engage the public about nanofoods, because of its role as a public information nexus.
As a result, nanofoods stakeholders need to be especially cognizant of how the media is responding to developments in the field and adjust their public communication strategies accordingly.
In 2011, Dudo et al. published the first analysis of journalistic nanotechnology coverage dealing specifically with nanofoods, and concluded that US newspaper articles have historically offered equitable treatment of the risks and benefits of food nanotechnology68. Nevertheless, media reporting of nanofoods issues is sure to continue evolving. Owing in part to a reduction in the number of journalists dedicated specifically to science reporting, Dudo et al. predict that future journalistic coverage of food nanotechnology is “likely to become even more event-driven and devoid of the more thoughtful treatments that specialist reporters are able to provide”. Moreover, an increasing journalistic focus on safety or ethical concerns, or on news about regulatory gaps or industry silence about product development, could irrevocably damage public trust and lessen the effectiveness of future engagement initiatives68.
The Dudo et al. study is an admirable first step in trying to understand how the media is influencing public opinion of nanofoods, but it is limited to newspaper coverage and does not consider other sources of information such as Wikipedia, YouTube, podcasts and blogs.
Though some researchers have suggested that online news formats may help slow down or even reverse the widening knowledge gap between socio-economic demographics69, the Nanotechnology Engagement Group has warned that “as news media becomes more self-selectively personalized, readers will be even more able to ignore information that contrasts with pre-existing judgements: a self-sustaining cycle of one-sided information”49. Clearly, research is needed to understand how these new types of media sources influence public perceptions of risk, and stakeholders in nanofoods need to include these new media in their risk-communication strategies.
Furthermore, a significant hurdle faced by stakeholders in any new technology is the silence of knowledgeable scientists, doctors, engineers and other experts in the wake of a breaking news story. Institutional restrictions on independent engagement with the media has been cited as a serious problem52, because breaking news stories are often biased by the collective voices of individuals and organizations with extreme agendas and a sophisticated knowledge of how to capitalize on media opportunities.
Recognizing this issue, the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization have jointly advocated the concept of a Science Media Centre, an independent, agenda-free organization that “works to get evidence-based science and credible scientists into the news media, at a time when society needs them most”52. A centre dedicated specifically to food-related media interactions would be immensely valuable to stakeholders in nanofoods as a means of injecting reliable and factual information into media treatments of the subject and ensuring that a vocal minority does not tip public sentiment in the direction of irrational fears.
