At the Nexus of Food Security and Safety: Opportunities for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology
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social policies and economic investment and, notably, new technologies.1 Technologies are needed to enable sustainable and intelligent farming practices as the increased food production is forecasted to be achievable by increasing crop yield and intensity. These technologies must be accessible to the developing world where the increase in population will demand the greatest need for food. Improving the safety of food in the supply chain calls for new regulations and, again, new technologies. In the United States, the Food Safety and Modernization Act was signed into law in 2011, requiring greater surveillance in the food supply chain and a shift from response to prevention.5 The Act calls for technologies to increase capabilities to detect and to respond to problems sooner and more effectively. Food packaging is integral to both reducing food waste and increasing food safety. Today, we rely on best-by or sell-by dates. However, these dates are confusing, as there are no national or international standards, labels have different meanings for different products, and these dates do not reflect environmental exposure in food handling.6 Integrating technology into packaging promises to change “the dating game” and make it a science and not a statistic. Nanoscale materials and devices are uniquely positioned to provide the needed technologies to respond to the grand challenge at the nexus of food security and safety.7−10 Novel chemical, optical, electrical, magnetic, thermal, and mechanical properties arise at the nanoscale from finite size effects.11 The large surface-to-volume ratio inherent to nanoscale materials makes them highly sensitive to changes at their surfaces. For example, the color of plasmonic metal nanostructures or photonic crystals, the conductivity of semiconductor nanostructures, and the resonance frequency of mechanical cantilevers depend on the dielectric function, charge, and mass of matter at their surfaces. The properties of nanoscale materials are tunable with size, shape, and composition, allowing the characteristic amplitude, frequency, and phase of input and output signals used in their operation in devices to be engineered for specific applications. For example, nanoscale optical devices may be designed to operate at frequencies of environmental transparency. Functionalization of the surface of nanostructures with biomolecules creates lock and key specificity, necessary to distinguish dangerous pathogens.12 Many nanoscale materials and their devices are assembled bottom-up from solution, enabling low-cost, large-area, and additive methods to manufacture their technologies, which is key to making new technologies economically accessible for applications in food security and safety, particularly in the developing world. The chemical and physical properties unique to the nanoscale are better known for their active exploration in
n a 2009 report, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UNFAO) presented the grand challenge “How to Feed the World in 2050”, as the number of people worldwide is estimated to grow to 9.1 billion.1 This increase in population is largely centered in the developing world, and ensuring its food security is projected to require a 70% increase in food production. The needed increase in food production faces pressures from increasing urbanization and biofuel production and from climate change, which limit available land, water, biodiversity, and agriculture yield. In 2013, the UNFAO highlighted a “missed opportunity” in the quest for food security. One third of food produced (1.3 billion metric tons per year) is wasted in the supply chain; in the developing world, this is mostly due to poor quality, spoilage, and contamination, and in the developed world, this waste is largely due to package expiration and aesthetics.2,3 Food waste, in turn, impacts our environment, adding to the stress on the amount of available land and water for food production and creating greenhouse gases that affect world climate.
Ensuring an abundant and safe food supply to protect the health and wellbeing of people worldwide calls for new initiatives from farm-to-table. The challenge is to ensure not only the supply of food but also the safety of our food. In the developed world, it is food safety that takes center stage and receives high-profile media coverage. Incidents of food contamination from dangerous bacteria, viruses, parasites, toxins, and chemicals cause food poisoning and even death in people with compromised immune systems.4 Foodborne illnesses are, in turn, economically costly: for the people sickened, driving medical care expenses and loss of productivity and income; for the food industry, necessitating food recalls and waste and damaging business reputation; and for the taxpayers, requiring local and national resources to be mobilized to monitor pathogens and to trace the origins of outbreaks back to their sources. The source of food contamination can occur anywhere in the supply chain, from the field or farm, to the food-processing facility, and in food handling before it reaches the table. Food packaging and handling is important, as many bacteria only cause illness if present in large amounts. Exposure of food with low levels of bacteria to hot and moist environments may trigger the bacteria to multiply to levels that cause illness. Ensuring an abundant and safe food supply to protect the health and well-being of people worldwide calls for new initiatives from farm-to-table. Meeting the targeted increases in food production necessary for a secure future will require new © 2016 American Chemical Society
Published: March 22, 2016 2985
DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.6b01483 ACS Nano 2016, 10, 2985−2986
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biomedical technologies for diagnostics and therapeutics,13 but these same chemical−physical modalities may be employed to sense the environmental changes and pathogens that impact the security and safety of our food supply. Indeed, the goals of food security align in many ways with those of the proposed microbiome initiative; each may inform and advance the other.12
Editorial
REFERENCES
(1) Food and Agriculture Organization. How to Feed the World in 2050 Executive Summary 2009; 2050, 1−35. (2) UN News. UN Report: One-Third of World’s Food Wasted Annually, at Great Economic, Environmental Cost. 2013; http://www. un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=45816#.VtR44niOeLE (Accessed February 29, 2016). (3) Food Wastage Footprint. Impacts on Natural Resources. Summary Report, 2013; http://www.fao.org/docrep/018/i3347e/ i3347e.pdf (Accessed February 29, 2016). (4) CDC. 2011 Estimates of Foodborne Illness, 2011; http://www. cdc.gov/foodborneburden/2011-foodborne-estimates.html (Accessed February 29, 2016). (5) Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), 2011; https://www. gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-111publ353/pdf/PLAW-111publ353.pdf (Accessed February 29, 2016). (6) Leib, E. B.; Ferro, J.; Nielsen, A.; Nosek, G.; Qu, J. The Dating Game: How Confusing Food Date Labels Lead to Food Waste in America. NRDC Rep. 2013, R:13-09-A; http://www.nrdc.org/food/ files/dating-game-report.pdf (Accessed February 29, 2016). (7) Farahi, R. H.; Passian, A.; Tetard, L.; Thundat, R. Critical Issues in Sensor Science To Aid Fod and Water Safety. ACS Nano 2012, 6, 4548−4556. (8) Parak, W. J.; Nel, A. E.; Weiss, P. S. Grand Challenges for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. ACS Nano 2015, 9, 6637−6640. (9) http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/h2020-sections (Accessed February 29, 2016). (10) http://www.futurenanoneeds.eu/ (Accessed February 29, 2016). (11) Peng, B.; Li, G.; Li, D.; Dodson, S.; Zhang, Q.; Zhang, J.; Lee, Y. H.; Demir, H. V.; Ling, X. Y.; Xiong, Q. Vertically Alligned Gold Nanorod Monolayer on Arbitrary Substrates: Self- Assembly and Femtomolar Detection of Food Contaminants. ACS Nano 2013, 7, 5993−6000. (12) Biteen, J. S.; Blainey, P. C.; Cardon, Z. G.; Chun, M.; Church, G. M.; Dorrestein, P. C.; Fraser, S. E.; Gilbert, J. A.; Jansson, J. K.; Knight, R.; Miller, J. F.; Ozcan, A.; Prather, K. A.; Quake, S. R.; Ruby, E. G.; Silver, P. A.; Taha, S.; van den Engh, G.; Weiss, P. S.; Wong, G. C. L.; et al. Tools for the Microbiome: Nano and Beyond. ACS Nano 2016, 10, 6−37. (13) Alivisatos, P. The Use of Nanocrystals in Biological Detection. Nat. Biotechnol. 2004, 22, 47−52. (14) Duncan, T. V. Applications of Nanotechnology in Food Packaging and Food Safety: Barrier Materials, Antimicrobials and Sensors. J. Colloid Interface Sci. 2011, 363, 1−24.
Nanoscale materials and devices are uniquely positioned to provide the needed technologies to respond to the grand challenge at the nexus of food security and safety.
Nanoscale technologies that sense water, heat, ions, and pH in the environment and pathogens that cause disease would enable sustainable and intelligent practices in the field and on the farm. These sensors would allow optimization of the water, fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides needed to increase food production, while preventing their overuse, which threatens climate change and water scarcity. Sensors to detect disease early, before it spreads across the crops in the field or animals in the farm, would reduce food waste, shortages, and price escalation, as well as occurrences of foodborne illness. Similarly, sensors deployed across food processing facilities would enable early detection and the development of practices to “quarantine” pathogens locally and to prevent widespread contamination across the facility. Nanoscale technologies may provide better barriers to environmental exposure.14 Integration of sensors in food packaging to monitor food exposure to heat, moisture, and air and food levels of dangerous pathogens could provide responsive, intelligent dating to ensure food safety. The opportunities for nanoscale science and technology to impact the grand challenge at the nexus of food security and safety are exciting. It will require economic and intellectual investment and innovation in the science and engineering of nanoscale materials and devices and, importantly, in pushing frontiers in the design and manufacturing of nanosystems. These investments are likely to pay off many times over, both economically and in terms of global and human health. Integration of sensors with devices that provide computation, communication, and power are needed to realize complete and deployable nanosystems. There will be challenges to technology adoption. The systems must be low-cost, low-power, lightweight, flexible, and nontoxic to be compatible with the safety, practices, and economy of the food industry. The importance of ensuring an abundant and safe supply of food worldwide is a challenge too important to miss and speaks to the problemsolving nature of the nanoscience, nanotechnology, and related communities.
Cherie R. Kagan, Associate Editor
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AUTHOR INFORMATION
Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS. 2986
DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.6b01483 ACS Nano 2016, 10, 2985−2986
