What Do We Eat? What Are We Going to Eat? New Challenges in Terms of Technological and Scientific Advances in Food Production

Advances in techno science focused on food production have fostered a race among investors in this field, in view of future markets, especially in relation to the use of transgenics and nanotechnologies. New proposals and possibilities for increasing productivity, as well as the promise that hunger can be decimated from the planet, are undoubtedly an attractive discourse that ends up co-opting several sectors of society and making it difficult and / or delaying the elaboration of a normalization and regularization about what is produced and how it is produced. Due to the advertisement made for these new foods, a fertile social imaginary has been created in front of this "new world". Transgenic foods and the use of nanotechnology in food production, which results in foods called nanofoods, are the spearhead of this modernization of food production, as they seem to be able to solve numerous problems in this field, creating a new conception of food and modernity in the field of food supply. Based on the results of the research "Nanotechnologies applied to food and biofuels: recognizing the essential elements for the development of risk indicators and regulatory frameworks that protect health and the environment" (Projeto Nanobiotec / CAPES / 2009), developed in from 2009 to 2014, this communication discusses what lies behind this wave of optimism and the challenges that are posed to the social sciences, including the Law, in the face of these innovations in the food field, to the new conceptions of the future that and the contradictions that accompany these achievements, as well as the fact that we do not yet have regulatory frameworks for food products from nanotechnology, which makes the population vulnerable to the possible negative effects they may have on human health and the environment.