Novel foods and food ingredients: what is the mission of scientists and technologists? Manuel Mota* and Jose Empis y,{ *Centro de Eng a Biolo gica - IBQF, Universidade do Minho, Braga, Portugal y Centro de Eng a Biolo gica eQuõ  mica, Instituto Superior TeÂcnico, Av. Rovisco Pais, P-1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal (Tel.:+351-218417889; fax: +351-218417889; e-mail: pcjempis@popsrv.ist.utl.pt) The situation concerning world food production is changing dramatically. On the one hand, the world population is expected to grow still further, reaching about 8 billion peo- ple in the middle of the 21st century. Novel phenomena, such as ageing of the human population and excess weight in developing countries pose new nutrition problems. Food scares, which were enhanced by recent BSE and tox- icological outbreaks, hinder the applicability of some solu- tions. Under these conditions, scientists and technologists should participate actively in the tasks of informing the population as well as ®nding new ways to provide people with the optimal amount of nutritious food. # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction Food scientists have existed for some time, largely at ®rst because of the social need to ®ght fraud. This need produced the ®rst breed of food chemists and physicists, mainly working for the regulatory authorities in the 19th century. As food production transformed itself in keeping with the industrial revolution, food scientists accumulated in industry. As their scienti®c capabilities and knowledge progressed, they became capable of tackling the extremely complicated biological matrix even without a more or less immediate economical objective, and, therefore, found their niche in uni- versities and research institutions too. Food scientists are trained, at high cost to the com- munity, because food is recognised to be of an over- whelming importance, from the economic, strategic and political points of view. Nutritionists, mainly involved in public and personal health and quality of life, appeared much for the same reasons. It is, therefore, probably indisputable that food sci- entists and nutritionists when taken as a group will master in an unrivalled way the potential, the trends of demand, the physicochemical and nutritional properties and the marketing complexities of novel foods and food ingredients. We would like to point out, as Science recently did [1], that it is, therefore, their utmost professional duty to society, to participate and indeed to foster, eorts cap- able of informing the public about the present and foreseeable food-related problems for humanity, about the existing answers to perceived problems, and about the major hurdles and proposed solutions for them. For this purpose, they must train their communication skills by debate, and resolve their scienti®c dierences before addressing the community. The strong progress in information technologies enabled both an unprecedented data crunching cap- ability for the knowledgeable individual, and a wider, apparently all-embracing awareness by the public in general, largely due to eorts by the media and, of course, the internet. As regards food, this means that in industrial or post-industrial societies, data availability has spread to such an extent that, given any motivation whatsoever, individuals may gather data and construe arguments in favour of any of their beliefs, even if their origin is far from rational. Novel foods and food ingredients, inasmuch as they represent a breach with tradition, naturally fall into an especially controversial class of eminently publicised and controversial subjects. One should ponder about 0924-2244/00/$ - see front matter Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S0924-2244(00)00059-5 Trends in Food Science & Technology 11 (2000) 161±168 Viewpoint { Corresponding author.