The biggest, most profitable food companies in the nation are always seeking new ways to increase food production, preserve that food longer, enhance its taste, and pretty up its appearance. And they do so with the help of a wide variety of chemicals — 80,000 or so of them, to be exact. That’s how many chemicals the EPA and FDA estimate are in the food that Americans eat every day — and that we know very little about. It’s quite hard, it turns out, to keep up with the engine of industrial food production. But a super-efficient chemical-testing robot could help.

Introducing Tox21, a robot that’s being developed by some of the top scientific agencies in the nation. Researchers believe Tox21 will be able to test thousands of chemicals at once, giving citizens a much clearer picture of what’s in their food — and the opportunity to sort out toxic chemicals before they land on your plate.

My colleague Jaymi Heimbuch over at TreeHugger has some details:

The process for testing [chemicals in food] to get sufficient data is arduous and slow. But after six years of development, Tox21 is ready to be tested. “The effort’s first phase — testing about 300 chemicals — began in 2008. The second, or the “industrial phase,” launched recently and will test about 10,000 chemicals comparing data it collects to existing toxicity information as a test of the robot’s accuracy. The conclusion of the project is still years away, but Robert Kavlock, director of EPA’s National Center for Computational Toxicology, said data being gathered in the early going will help EPA and other agencies figure out which chemicals need additional testing, reports the New York Times.

The fact that we need an industrial-sized super robot just to figure out what the hell corporations are putting in our food should be ample evidence that Michael Pollan and his ilk are right: Big Food has brought us further away from natural, healthy, and safe foods than ever before. We’re eating truckloads of stuff that food-eating humans wouldn’t recognize 50 years ago. It’s stuffed full of coloring, preservatives, flavor-enhancers, and chemicals that we still don’t entirely understand. But given that it’s conventional wisdom that this scale of food production will be necessary to feed the world (I have my doubts, as the localized food movement makes a strong case for ‘distributed’ food economies), we’re not likely to see Big Food close its factory doors anytime soon.

So at least technology is beginning to keep pace on the consumer protection end, as well.

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Photo credit: Christian Cable via Flickr/CC BY