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One of New Scientist’s editorials this week highlights that nanoparticles are the new ‘chemicals’, but not the new black, if you’re coming at this blog from a fashion standpoint. The Soil Association, which campaigns for organic food and farming, has announced that it is banning nanoparticles from its certified organic products. However, it’s only banning human-made nanoparticles. Natural ones are just fine apparently.

Chemicals, in the world-outside-science-as-we-know-it, are always the bad boys – the non-natural enemies of all that is good. The fact that everything we know is made of chemicals seems to have passed this world by. And now New Scientist points out that nanoparticles are in the same position: human-made bad, natural good. Although of course soot and, say, viruses, aren’t what you’d necessarily welcome in your dinner.

Agency discussions around nanotechnology to date have been very much in the context of how they may apply to packaging or new preparations of food ingredients, and the ethical, regulatory and chemical safety challenges this may raise and we’ve currently got some research running on the implications for our work.

Last year’s Foresight report, overseen by the then Government Chief Scientist Sir David King, talks of nanoscale sensors tracking different foods as they travel through the body, leading to adjustments in molecular structures as a means of aiding digestion and/or reducing the body’s absorption of sugars and how it stores fat.

So with it on everyone’s scanned horizon, nanotechnology looks set to be on a number of agendas in the coming years. It would help, however, if we could classify it as what it is, a new technology, rather than as another recruiting poster for the neonaturals.