Meeting notice: The 00.08.15 meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably know where we are. More details below. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Proposed topic: The future of entirely artificial food While NT has been seen as unwrapping its agricultural applications from the biotech end, that is, by modifying traditional foods, recent political developments suggest that the market, at least in the developed nations, may insist that such foods retain their historical nature. However, this does not mean that NT, let alone technological change, has no entry point in the foods industry. There is a category of foods that is so processed that its members have no natural referent at all. They cannot be perceived as unnatural, because there is no natural counterpart against which they can be measured. "Artificial food" raises no labeling or sorting issues, since it is perfectly obvious what it is. Today such foods are sold as diet foods or fitness boosters or 'lunch snacks' -- superfast food for Cubicle monkeys. Their reputation in the taste department is, to understate the point, low, but as our understanding of these senses develop the quality of such foods should grow. Eventually food engineers should be able to design taste narratives -- stories that unfold through the sequence of tastes experienced as the item is consumed. Nanotechnology, almost regardless of its state of development, would have an obvious role to play in working through these design issues. Further, to the degree that artificial food is out of a chemical foodstock it is inherently green, requiring neither the slaughterhouse nor the plough. While no A-food I know of is being sold with such a campaign now surely that it is only a matter of time. The marketing would write itself -- showing natural habitat steamrollered into farmland, cute chickens singing dolefully as they trudge to the slaughterhouse, etc. 'Every two seconds twenty chickens are ruthlessly slaughtered,' the overvoice over might say. 'Why associate yourself with this wanton destruction, this contempt for life? Do you part to lighten the load on Mother Nature's back; eat an AuraBar(TM) for lunch.' As all these elements come together -- the growing command over advanced food design, bringing with it the capacity to capitalize on every new fashion impulse (color-coordinate your food and your furnishings); the organization of localized production centers (perhaps at first the neighborhood Kinko's or 1 Hour film development booths; eventually in the home itself), and the campaign for shunning systems that require the slaughter of animals and/or the destruction of habitat (we might see activists ripping up organic farms as a symbol of 'habitat genocide') -- agriculture would no longer be a rural, land- intensive, industry. Traditional foods would be to the culinary arts like historical flowers are to horticulture; the enthusiasm of a handful of reenactors with special skills and interests. Other implications are imaginable. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> www.nanodot.org continues to be a remarkably useful resource in tracking all these issues. Highly recommended. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Legend: "NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group. The Group meets on the first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and little else. If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a sample via a forward) send the string 'subscribe nsg' to majordomo@world.std.com. Unsubs follow the same model. Discussion should be sent to nsg- d@world.std.com, which must be subscribed to separately. You must be subscribed to nsg-d to post to it and must post from the address from which you subscribed (An anti- spam thing). Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to: nsg@pobox.com.