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RFID Tags to Track Your Food
Angry_Admin writes "According to the article at IT World Canada, 'Recent food security scares have triggered public outcries and intense concern. People want to know exactly what is in their food, and what is done to it by whom. In response, Canada and many other countries are introducing traceability requirements - records that track all links in the food supply chain, from farmers to processors to retailers to consumers. The Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada agency recently released a policy framework, stating the goal is to make 80 per cent of all food products traceable by 2008.'"
Why is my Big Mac linking back to a horse farm??
What's missing in this picture is some approach that makes food safe, period. While it's laudable to want to have our long arms of the law around the whole food chain of command, it hardly addresses (in my opinion) real evil, and general detriment to the humanity collective health. There are products and chemicals in food today that for various percentages of the population cause severe side effects, and potentially (probably) are more dangerous than the highly publicized "contamination" food issues.
If you want an example of one good read about just one chemical (MSG, introduced in many nefarious and hidden forms to our foods), read and branch out on this site .
The RFID idea doesn't address:
I see what this article talks about as useful in some sense, but the sum total malaise caused by contamination of our food supply with weird (and to many, unknown) chemicals outpaces, outweighs, and almost trumps the money that would be spent on a massive RFID program.
be kinda hard to chew?
Hacker Media
With all the genetic engineering in our food nowadays... an apple will probably look something like this when traced by RFID
1 Apple= 75% Apple, 10% Orange, 5% Pear, 10% Random Genetic Code
It was about time!
I just hope that the next time I drag a cow out of a shop the alarm doesn't go off.
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
Now we will finally be able to know who contaminated the mashed potatoes...you know what I'm talking about.
And you can track my crap too!
I'll believe that when they demand proper labeling for GM contamination and other artificial ingredients.
What?
What recent food security scares? I'm pretty sure I'd see something sensational about it on FOX if there were any and I have not.
The RFID tags are not going to be in the food you eat, rather they are in the packaging the food comes in. This presents a problem for things like fruit, since now you might only be able to buy fruit and veggies from a store if they are already in a bag, or in a specific bag with the right ID tag.
It is not a ploy to get you to swallow tags so your toilet can analyse your leavings, like in the recent hit movie "The Island".
Canadian ranchers are also working on getting every cow RFID tagged, and testing each one for BSE before it goes to market.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Enter the latitude/longitude from the RFID into your GPS and go beat the crap out of the cow that produced the milk yourself!
"Waiter, my salad apparently passed through 3 Mile Island, may I have another?"
"Certainly, Madame. Please allow me to light your candle as an alternate light source."
"Waiter, why did my hamburger pass through Mecca?"
"To go on Hajj. It was a very devout cow."
"Waiter, why was my pork chop processed in L.A.?"
"Suffice it to say, monsieur, that many applicants for the part of 'Babe the Pig' did not get cast."
"Manager, why does the General Tso's chicken say that it passed through Daytona Beach?"
"Well, it wanted to get some Spring Break...er...nevermind."
:) Exactly!. Here comes the end of McDonalds/BurgerKing/KFC/... :D
if only people knew what happened to their favorite cow/hen from the time it was "medically-pleasent put to sleep" in the "farm" till it reached their "low-carb" bun/plate, they would all go vegan
"From the moment I could talk, I was ordered to listen" - Cat Stevens
Fine. Track THIS!
> plop! flushhhhhhhh
Well it's not so bad for food. If it was clothing, or books, there are privacy problems definitely--you are going to generally wear clothes a lot, so if there is a db of which you have bought you can be tracked. Same with books, you either buy them or are going to borrow them from the library. However food you are probably going to just take home, and toss the packaging when you're done. What food you eat is already tracked thanks to those loyalty card programs.
... about the drugs they give cattle and other animals raised for food. I've done searches for web sites to tell me what these drugs are and found very little information. It would sure be nice if someone were to try to track all that and tell us what these drugs are, what they're supposed to do, and how much research has been done to see how traces of them might affect humans.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
Huh? Where are these 'people'? People don't give two craps about anything, let alone where their food has been.
If people really wanted to know what's in their food, chains like McDonalds wouldn't be in business.
The greatest experience we can have is the mysterious.
- Albert Einstein
I should say PER-ITEM RFID is NOT required for tracking. RFIDs are expensive - a few pennies each at best. Printing a serial number on each item can be much much cheaper.
All that is required is a way to track each box or crate from creation to store, and serial number for each package or item.
You put the RFID tags on the pallets or crates (they can be scanned from a distance), and print the lot# and serial# on the box and item. Make the lot# part of the serial# and you have built-in recordkeeping.
For non-packaged foods like fruit, edible ink or stick-on labels are the way to go for the serial numbers.
This may not work well with items like bananas, where the "item" is the bunch but customers routinely split up bunches.
Now all that's required is a way to actually TRACK the items as they leave the store. For items costing more than a few dollars, RFID may be the cheapest way to go. For small items like a stick of gum, it may not be worth tracking. But if it is, scanning a printed serial number is doable, albeit at a non-trivial cost to retailers to replace or upgrade their check-out equipment.
Personally, I think whoever came up with this requirement should do a cost-benefit analysis before mandating it on anyone.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Hmmm.. Track our food. You know, if robots ever did take over, they'd have an awful easy time tracking us down and doing whatever they will.
"make sure you're keeping track of the nearest available rest rooms!
When in Australia, you need to check this out: http://www.toiletmap.gov.au/
Crunchy. BZZT! And shocking.
I thought all cattle were already uniquely tagged with ear-tags. Guess I was wrong.
The only reason to go from ear-tag to RFID is that it MIGHT be more cost-effective: RFID may save more money than it costs when it comes to things like moving large numbers of cattle quickly while keeping an "eye" on each and every one of them.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I think what they are implicitly saying is that "the people that matter" want to know where their food has been. In a democracy, the people that matter are the ones that are willing to get up off their @sses and make their opinions know. The "silent majority" make themselves irrelevant by actively choosing not to participate.
-GameMaster
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
Great, now that we know where our food has been no one will ever go out to a restaurant again. There are some things in life that's best kept a mystery, like why you can never replicate that taste at home in your kitchen.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
In a democracy, the people that matter are the ones that are willing to get up off their @sses and make their opinions know.
Yes, if by "the ones that are willing to get up off their @sses" you really mean "the people who own the richies in washington".
Nutrasweet.
MSG
salts (For those that don't get it, ask a nurse about this old saw "The dose makes the poison". Anything, even the most basic element of life, is deadly in excessive quantities.)
"Preservatives" is a little generic. Even salt in its most basic form is a preservative. Sugar is as well. Liquid maple syrup preserves (get this) hardened maple syrup. So, yeah... hmmm... I'll let you all have at this one.
As far as olestra goes, the results of eating too much (dose makes the poison again) are clearly labelled on the packaging, and apart from being messy, aren't any more dangerous than eating several bowls of all bran.
Did you know that MSG is in breast milk? Yup, in fact, the purpose of MSG is to make food "moreish". This way babies are more inclined to keep drinking mother's milk. I don't see babies suffering from migraines.
That is the most contrived bullshit story I've ever heard to promote RFID.
Tracing the origin of food has nothing to do with RFID it has everything to do with the batch number printed on the food.
Tracking food is very useful when your distribution system is so bad that people are starving because the food isn't making it to market. Talking about the corruption of the food supply is a luxury afforded only to those who have enough food in the first place.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
This won't happen any time soon in the US. And here's why I say that.
This past session, there was a bill in both sides of Congress that would have required all meat products to be labled as to their country of origin, etc. The industry lobby made sure the bill died. Apparently us 'mericans are too damned stupid to be trusted with such information. They don't want us to know where the meat in our burgers come from.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Or Ottawa in this situation.
In Soviet Russia, You track RFID!
Why the scare over GM? Oh I know, because it's "not natural". Right, neither is building houses, cooking your food, the homogenization/decontamination of milk or birth control. Are you against these too?
Genetically modified foods: traditional cross-breeding/cross-pollinization theory applied with more advanced tools on a wider scope.
Seriously, anti-GM advocates need to chill out and get a grip.
What, no Google map hack with webcam links?
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
Here's a food tip for you: In a pinch, you can use your tinfoil hat as a makeshift saucepan.
In Canadian McDonald's, FOOD tracks YOU!
This system is already implemented widely in Japan. There have been several panics about food poisoning in various types of fresh vegetables, which is usually associated with specific batches from specific farms, but the panic causes drops in sales of all vegetables of that type. To confine the panic and the sales losses somewhat, there is a new system to track food products to the source. In some stores, you can go up to a barcode reader and get the details of the packaged product's origin. Seems like a good idea to me, especially after some of the recent tainted food scandals in Japan (you don't want to know).
This will cuase tons of problems for the small to medium size american farmer. They are trying to do the same thing with cattle. This has the potential to cause many americans to loose their ways of life. Farming is already a negative growth industry, and prices are still near those of the 1950's. If you start adding in tons more cost to the process, many of these small family businesses will go belly up and the people running them will loose the only thing they have ever known to do.
But there are people that do care and want to know where their food has been. While I wouldn't necessarily go that far, I'd definitely like to know more about the chemicals involved and any other artificial additives. There are so many conflicting reports from both ends of the spectrum that it's damn near impossible to find anything truthful.
Fun Zoid RPG
You are absolutely correct when you mention "the dose makes the poison" , which I meant implicitly in my post, i.e., the amounts of the stuff in the foods is the problem.
Yes there are many natural occurences of MSG, but there are too many foods with exorbitant amounts of the stuff (almost said xorbitol amounts...). And there is much evidence MSG causes symptoms.
Thanks for the snopes reference on aspartame. I'm already aware there are lots of crazy claims around various chemicals and their effects from ingestion. So, I get it, aspartame doesn't cause lukemia. However there are many documented cases and plenty of anecdotal evidence that a major and not-so-rare side effect is headaches, which is the only symptom I mentioned in my post.
As for olestra being no different than eating several bowls of bran that's probably mostly true, but the taste and texture and experience of munching on olestra laden chips is much more attractive and more likely to occur, and comparatively speaking the amount consumed necessary to "trigger" the bran reaction is tiny compared to how full one would feel eating several bowls of bran. And, who's to say there are no ill effects of the intestinal tract being evacuated like that? There are all kinds of potential problems with this. For example, nutrients that otherwise would have been absorbed in the digestive tract are flushed out way to quickly for the body to absorb them. Also there are some studies suggesting olestra could interfere with absorbtion of nutrients.
Then there's the issue of flushing out all the bacteria in the digestive system, not a good thing.
Why is this a great idea? Man has been eating food since the dawn of time and somehow we've managed to live quite nicely without tracking it from start to finish. If you're that paranoid about your food, put in a garden.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
While I will grant that there may be some ingredients in common food products which negatively affect the health of certain individuals to a reasonable extent, I must disagree with you on your claim that MSG is, in fact, a harmful substance (to anyone).
.25g/cm^3, corn .13g/cm^3), and the average american eats roughly 20 grams of it a day. Of that 20 grams, only about 1.5 grams is artificially produced! Glutamate is actually responsible for an entire realm of taste.
First, let us look at the structure of it. MSG stands for Monosodium Glutamate. It is a salt consisting of a single (mono) sodium ion (Na+) attached to a glutamate ion. Clearly you cannot be alergic to sodium, but what about glutamate?
Glutamate, the molecule produced when MSG is dissolved (along with the sodium ion), is required for proper functioning of any animal I've ever studied. It is a neurotransmitter (the principal one used in sight, actually, so if you lacked it you would be blind). It is naturally occuring in the body, and the body is designed to naturally convert glutamate outside of the central nervous system into L-glutamate, which the brain and muscles use for energy. The body produces large ammounts of free glutamate all the time. The point is, if you were alergic to glutamate you would be dead.
But perhaps the above was not convincing enough... Maybe the glutamate from MSG changes the body's glutamate concentration somehow (which it does not). It just so happens that many of the foods people eat on a regular basis are very MSG rich. Do you like parmesan cheese? It contains roughly 1.2 grams of MSG for every cubic centimeter. That is huge! MSG exists in almost any food you eat (brocolli
Double blind study after double blind study has shown that those claiming alergies to MSG were, in fact, either placeboing or alergic to something else. In chinese cooking (notorius for MSG content), several vegetables and spices are used which people would rarely come in contact with in other settings. Several of these are known to be alergenic, and many individuals find themselves blaming MSG for their allergies to other substances.
To boot, MSG is actually healthier for you than the alternative. With MSG you can cut down the sodium content of food drastically. The negative health affects of large sodium intake are real, and MSG is one of the ways that food producers can limit sodium content without cutting back on flavor. The FDA lists MSG as "Generally Regocnized as Safe", the same category as sodium chloride (table salt) and sodium bicarbonate (baking powder).
I love looking at a can of spaghetti-Os... It happily advertises "NO MSG" above the nutrition information, but it contains a whopping 1.78 grams of sodium per 15oz can. It also happens to contain a cheese culture (read MSG rich). Hooray for destroying the elasticity of your arteries! Just avoid those evil artificial salts that are, in fact, naturally occuring in everything you eat anyway.
(please excuse the sole use of wiki, but I cannot link my text books)
Huh? Where are these 'people'?
Yo!
If people really wanted to know what's in their food, chains like McDonalds wouldn't be in business.
Yeah, those would be the people who blamed me for thinking that potatoes weren't a beef product. Silly me. I would have liked to have been informed otherwise.
Aside from vegetarians there are people with all sorts of food intolerances and allergies. I have a need to know exactly what is in every mouthful of food I eat, or I could end up in deep, deep shit. I am not alone.
How on earth some government worker being able to track where my food has been is going help me know what's in it before I eat it is beyond me. Nor will they give a damn about what's in it after the fact either. They already know and don't care.
KFG
I know people who choose where they shop based on where the store gets their goods, trying to only buy from stores that buy their goods from local farmers and other local businesses. In a sense, they're low-key activists.
But, in a statistical sense, their being activists at all makes them more likely to commit crimes that fall under that "terrorism" term. If food purchasing patterns were to be fed into a program like CAPPS II, they would be more likely to be singled out for harassment at checkpoints such as those in airports.
Even thoroughly-tracked lot IDs would serve to illuminate a connection between these people and the locality of the purchases they make.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
The EU has required that GM food be labelled as such since April 2004.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I know where it is when it goes in. I know where it is when it comes out. I guess someone wants to know where it goes after the flush.
-- Always read the headlines; never read the summaries. It's just a waste of time.
If consumers wanted healthy food, they'd be buying it. They want cheap, tasty food. The easiest way to make food tasty is to pack it with salt and/or sugar. This is not a trend which will be reversed any time soon. Your best bet is to get a catalog from an organic food retailer, buy a bunch of bulk stuff, and make food :P I know some people who do this kind of thing because they're even more worried about the contents of their bodies than you are and they prefer to be all-organic. It can be pretty inexpensive really, but you frequently have to buy cases...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
artificial sweeteners (I am one of the "urban myth" people who gets excruciating migraines if I ingest nutrasweet.)
Nope, I get bad bad headaches from aspartame. Sucralose doesn't do it, and neither does regular or brown sugar.
The only real problem with GM food is that it allows corporations to call crops intellectual property. They can actually prevent you from harvesting the seeds from the plants you grow and planting them the next year for your own profit. I think there was a slashdot story on this. Now this would be just fine as long as non-patented crops are still produced, but what is the motivation to distribute crops you can't control with a patent? Maybe there will be an open source food project?
not everyone eats at mcdonalds. I sure as hell don't. And I like the idea of there being more traceability and accountability in the food chain. I'd like to be 100% sure when I pay extra for a free-range chicken thats it really is free range, for example.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
I remember my first try when I was a kid. Happens every time, and always has.
I avoid artificial sweetners like the plague.
Your problem here is that people are eating primarily processed foods! The easiest way to ensure your diet consists of what you want is to make everything yourself. Start from the simplest blocks you can find that don't contain the ingredients your avoiding and you're all set. You mean that frozen dinner isn't good for me? Shocking! Cooking for yourself is often healthier and cheaper, and I personally find it enjoyable.
At least I want the right to make an informed choice.
In Canada, the GM lobbyists have paid off enough politicians so that labeling isn't required. In fact, it might even be illegal to label food as non-GMed.
It has been pointed out that one reason the Department of Defense pays $500 for a hammer is the fact that everything they buy pretty much has to have a "pedigree" which traces the hammer from the mine where the ore is gotten up to the delivery.
NOW we want mil-spec food?
Can anybody say "$2000 Big Mac"?
you're talking about an entirely different--and already addressed--issue completely. food producers are already required to list the ingredients contained in their products, however, because of poor quality control sometimes unwanted--and unlisted--"ingredients" get into the food product. this allows people to trace it back to the responsible party when there is a production chain.
secondly, if there are companies that you don't trust or that you dislike due to their business practices then you can avoid buying foods produced by them indirectly, such as foods linked to farms that use excessive insecticides, or foods made from the meat of animals that are treated unethically, or foods that are linked to a company that has a history of poor quality control, etc.
Because if there's one thing we really need to know, it's where that fly in our soup has been prior to landing there.
So now they'll be able to track what we eat, when we eat it, where it goes, and how it comes out with RFID sensors embedded in our food.
-Palal
When I came to live in this country, I found most foods tasted way too sugary.
Add sugar to my fresh brewed tea or coffee, and I'll throw it out.
I never add salt to my food either. And many (most?) shrink-wrapped foods are packed with sugar and salt.
To us foreigners who weren't accustomed to all that crap, it's disgusting.
There was a huge scandal concerning the use of motor oil in animal food. For over a week all chicken and milk related food were banned from the stores.
It made everyone so worried for the next few months, that some school kid fainted when smelling a bad odour in a coca cola. It caused half the school to feel sick. They had to be hospitalised. So there went all the coke out of the stores. New caps on the bottle to denote newly bottled ones, everyone (~10 million people) a free bottle) and a coca cola CEO appearing on national television making an apology, but who had to resign a few weeks later anyway. (Hey, per capita we are one hell of a coke lovers)
Now the funny thing is, that they tested that coke bottle the kid drank. Nothing wrong it. Conclusion: mass hysteria
But then again, a few months earlier we did eat all that motor oil.
I'm out of mod points at the moment but if I wasn't, I'd give you one.
My problem with the GP's post -- aside from it's factual claims which I cannot debate one way or the other -- is that it seems to boil down to 'some ingredients are bad for some people, therefore they should be banned.' Or something like that. In fact I'm not really clear on what he wants to do as a solution to the perceived "problem" of these allegedly toxic chemicals in the food.
I've cooked with MSG, and in certain dishes I really do think it adds flavor. If I was running a restaurant, maybe I would think twice about using it just because it has a bad reputation, but if I'm making asian food just for myself or my family, I wouldn't hesitate to use it if the recipe called for it.
Similarly, I think Olestra is a perfectly great invention. I eat Olean-fried potato chips from time to time and I've never had any of the dire "explosive diarrhea"-type consequences that some people apparently do. I'm not saying that other people don't, just that I don't suffer from this particular problem. And therefore given the choice of purchasing a bag of chips fried in Olean and one that's just fried in vegetable oil, I'll take the ones fried in Olean every time. The only downside of them to me is that they cost slightly more than the regular ones, but that's more than offset by the decreased fat and calories in them.
Similarly, I'm a big fan of diet sodas made with Nutrasweet and the other artificial sweeteners. I'm not against drinking water (I drink a lot of that, too) but I do enjoy soft drinks, and to be able to have a Diet Coke with zero calories as opposed to a regular one with several hundred is a big plus to me.
Basically, what the GP sees as poisons, I think are good and useful culinary inventions that allow me to enjoy more types of food more often or in greater quantities (or simply enjoy them more) than I otherwise could while still remaining healthy. If some people experience negative side effects as the result of certain ingredients, don't eat them! Nobody is going to come to your house and shove a bottle of Olestra down your throat. And I've never seen anything that was cooked in Olean or made with Nutrasweet that wasn't clearly marked as such (and generally priced accordingly).
You don't hear people with other kinds of food allergies asking for the items that they're allergic to be removed from all food: people just want their food's ingredients clearly marked. If there are foods out there which contain Olestra, or MSG, or Nutrasweet, or peanuts for that matter, and don't list them on the ingredients, then that is obviously a problem. But to say that the ingredients are a problem in and of themselves is ridiculous. Many people (I'd go so far as to say most) consume them without any problems, and especially in the case of Nutrasweet and Diet sodas, ask for them specifically in lieu of alternative products. (Also, consider diabetic people, to whom natural sugar might be effectively poisonous, but who can eat foods made with artificial sweeteners.) What right has anyone who may be allergic, to deny other people access to what they want to eat?
It seems to me that the idea of making food more 'traceable' back to its basic ingredients would be more helpful to people with food allergies, not less. But in general I just take great issue with anyone who seems to want to ban food ingredients because of personal problems they might have with them.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Hmm, who is going to pay my dentist bill for biting on the RF ID Tags?
Oh well, what the hell...
Your point being ... ?
So American food tastes disgusting to you. Congratulations. I'm sure a very large percentage of Americans would find the food from wherever you're from to be exactly as repulsive. It's called personal preferences.
And just as I wouldn't have any sympathy for the American who moved to Tibet and bitched about how foul yak's milk was and how hard it was to get a Hardee's Charbroiled Angus Beef burger, you'll excuse me if I have equally little sympathy for you. In fact less, since I'm quite sure that you can get whatever sort of food you require in this country, it will just cost you time and/or money to find and buy it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
This is true. I don't know whether all cattle are RFID tagged, but I'm sure that they've all got some sort of tags. They need to, in order to identify which farm they came from, etc. It serves essentially the same purpose that skin brands used to.
The proposal here is to maintain the tagging all the way through the food production chain, so the cows are tagged, the sides of beef that come out of the slaughterhouse are tagged, the ground meat from the packing plant is tagged, the hamburger patties are tagged. And then you have a big database that keeps track of all the relationships and cross-references between said tags, so that you could take a case of hamburger patties, scan it and run it through the database, and come up with a list of the cows that went into making that case. Or at least the farm where the cows were produced, the slaughterhouse where they were killed, the packing plant where the meat was ground, etc.
The benefit is if there was say a mad cow disease scare on a particular farm, it would be easier for officials to track down all the meat that came from cows on that farm, or even a particular subset of cows in that farm. Likewise it would also be easy for cooks to verify that their meat didn't come from cows that were contaminated.
I think the real benefit here is about the ease of recall, and minimizing the expense of a recall (so that you don't have to destroy all the passed through a particular point during a wide range of dates, instead you can focus on a subset that might have been exposed to contamination).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
And the US is trying to bully them out of it.
What?
Diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, artherosclerosis etc, etc.
And actually, it's hard, and you pay a premium, to get food without certain chemicals added.
Your basically being poisoned, and when I point it out, I'm the bad guy?
Genetically modified foods: traditional cross-breeding/cross-pollinization theory applied with more advanced tools on a wider scope.
Bullshit. No amount of cross-breeding is going to get a plant to express animal genes. So get your dick out of that pumpkin.
The General Food Law mandates tracking and tracing of all food produced in the EU.
And as far as I know the Dutch are leading within Europe.
USDA and NCBA are already all over this like a rash. Several states are a ways ahead of the Feds but a national system is literally month away from startup. Texas started a pilot beef tracking program a few weeks ago. Beef is already tracked to a great degree simply because of the value of each head. The problem has been that the tracking information has never been gathered by the gov't into a single place.
http://animalid.aphis.usda.gov/nais/index.shtml
Here is the link to USDA's National Animal Id System information site.
You are right in one way though. The US gov't won't be doing this. They are mandating that it be done but leaving the implementation to industry. Now I know what your thinking. What incentive will the industry have to do a better job. In this case, a lot. Sick customers don't come back and they take a lot of other customers with them.
My point was that the concept was nothing new. Farmers have been genetically engineering plants via cross-pollinization for decades. What is new is the technology and the expansion of choices of genes/traits for farmers to attempt to induce into a particular variety of plant.
So pull your head out of your ass.
Don't forget GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms). In Canada (and I think in the US) we don't have the ability to chose between GMO and non-GMO food. The Canadian government has strongly opposed legislation that would require labelling of GMO products as such, so if there is ever an issue with any GMO food, we're the guinea pigs.
Ah, but the federal experts insist that they have fully tested all the products, and deem them safe.
So what - federal experts have allowed all sorts of products on the market that turned out to be bad for us.
Don't get me wrong, I beleive that GMO foods have great potential to be a benefit, and improve our food supply, but we should have the ability to chose what we eat, and know where it came from.
Bavarian Purity Law of Rice Krispie Squares: Rice Krispies, Marshmallows, Butter, Vanilla.
...It comes from the store.
The agriculture dealers already run complete Supply Chain Management. They don't need RFID to track these food packets. This is just an RFID publicity stunt, exploiting people's fear of recent food product unsafety problems. Rather than fix the cannibalistic cycle of feeding animal byproducts back to the same species, which amplifies diseases - even tiny disease signals like previously innocuous prions - they're throwing RFID at it. Which makes it even more manageable to entrench that cycle, while propagandizing RFID as something that protects people. The natural PR move after that is to cash in on "RFID goodwill" by putting RFID on everything, then on everyone, in the name of security. They've sold us a bill of goods, and we're swallowing it.
--
make install -not war
On the less humorous level:
Horseshit
Fertilizer
Grass
Cow
Big Mac
and
Horseshit
Fertilizer
Lettuice/Pickle
Big Mac
Or, the less savory, but all too true:
Animal shit
Animal feed
Cow
Big Mac
Either way, I'm guessing people only want the last few steps of the food process monitored. Hearing exactly which animal's ass the fertilizer that grew the plant that either makes our food or fed our food fell out of just doesn't appeal to me.
Imagine if all information was ultimately hyperlinked together. Do we really need to know that "Flossie's stool was particularly liquid today but was still good enough for the fertilizer company." followed by the discovery that two days after providing her magnificent contribution to our diet she died of dissentry? Mmm. And I thought this was just a zestier than usual big mac.
Wow...you got trolled by the Ugly American, sorry about that.
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
Almost all cattle is tagged. The few that arn't are usually on small ranches where the owner can tell his 8 head apart just by sight. In those cases branding is still used keep things sorted out if one jumps a fence. Yes, a 1 ton bull can jump a 5 foot fence when it wants to get to the neighbor's heifer.
The problem is that this tag information is usually only kept by the individual producers. Sometimes by state vets. The trick now is to pull all this information together at the state and national level. The goal is to allow the gov't to be able to be able to traceback all the animals that have been exposed to an infected animal in less than 48 hours. Right now things can be tracked down but not very quickly.
You are exactly right on the food supply chain comment. A typical animal will come from a Cow-Cafe producer. Go to an auction barn, then a feed lot and finally to a packing plant. Not to mention all the layers in the retail supply chain. Each layer currently has its own way of keeping track of things. Part of the vision is for a consumer to be able to buy a steak from the grocery, take a control number of the side of the package, put it in a web site and see where your steak came from and where it has been.
You are also exactly right on the benefits to producers. The hope is that producers will want to track their cattle closely so they can prove that their animals never came into contact with infected animals. And if your animals have been exposed you don't want to have to deal with the liability. Better to destroy them and collect insurance and start over next year. At first animals with a completely traceable history will be sold for a premium. Eventually you won't be able to sell untraceable animals.
Mad cow is the hot button topic. It is definitly driving everyone to get this done quickly. In reality, it is astronomically unlikely for mad cow to get into our food supply. The FDA as banned the use of mammalian protein in ruminant animal feed since 1997 and even then it was no longer common practice in the US industry. Virtually all beef cattle is slaughtered by age 3, well past 1997. It is expensive to feed cattle so you send it do the packer as soon as it reaches full weight. You are only wasting money after that. The only domestic mad cow cases have been with older dairy cattle and they typically get made into dog food if anything at all. Mad cow doesn't get passed through the milk and even the beef it self is not infected. It is only in the brain, spine and sometimes in the tongue. Beef is now slaughtered in such a way that the spine and head are extracted whole. You really only take a chance if you like to eat these parts and few places will even sell it anymore.
The only mad cow I'm scared of is this one: http://www.totallytom.com/MadCow.html
Much of the beef industry has actually worked pretty hard to keep Canadian, Mexican and South American beef out of the US market. I don't know about the retail food industry but the beef industry is busting its ass to trace all beef back to its origin. Americans tend to want meat that is American. The US cattle industry wants consumers to have this information because they stand to win big on this point. Besides, the ruminant feed ban doesn't apply outside the US. That's why the beef industry made such a big deal out of the case in Washington being canadian cow.
I don't know why this bill failed in Congress and I don't know what's going to have to happen with the retail food industry but beef is going to be traced. The US cattle industry is very big, very rich and has everything to loose.
The industry is already ramping up state level pilot tracing projects and a non-manditory national system is coming on line this next week.
want to know exactly what is in their food - I am telling you what: RFID tags!
You can't handle the truth.
Hi. I agree with your post about labelling 100% but I'd like to point out that a gene doesn't know if it's "plant" or "animal". Whether it comes about by genetic mods or random mutation, it just "is". I understand your point though. The point against GMOs is we have developed a range of generally foods over millennia by the trial and error method: "Urg didn't die, therefore it's safe to eat". GMOs don't necessarily take into account that a gene from a "safe" source inserted into the genome of another "safe" plant/animal won't necessarily result in something that is safe. Biology's funny like that. Just when you think you understand it, nature will throw you a curve ball. The scientist in the lab studying the phenomenon in isolation can say "Hmmm, how odd" but what will the manufacturer say if the curve ball turns out to be lethal...
And who would stick their dick in a pumpkin. Watermelons are much nicer...
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Making all the ingredients in your food traceble is a good idea, because sometimes things go wrong. Contaminated ingredients do enter the food chain. Or somewhere in the process of assembling your food, just somewhere in the whole supply chain, a manufacturer finds out the products he supplied were not up to par. Being able to trace where the ingredients come from or where your products have gone to means less chance of bad food products being sold and consumed.
Now, the funny thing is that you do not need RFID's for this. Just a solid system to administer which ingredients go into which batch of the product you make, where you get the ingredients from and where you ship your product to.
This is all a little hypocritical. People may say they want to know what's in their food, but very often they don't. If they did, chances are they'd never eat fast food or a ready-meal again. What they want is the convenience of mass-produced food while also feeling that it's good for you. Unfortunately the two are often contradictory. So we enter a little game in which supermarkets are told to reduce the salt and/or sugar and fat in their products, for example, but on the whole fail to do so because if they did the stuff would be shown up for the denatured sludge that it is and their customers would start complaining.
If you want good food, don't use supermarkets. Buy from local stores, which the supermarkets will put out of business if no one uses them, and prepare it all yourself. Four slices of brown bread from one of the supermarkets where I live contain more fat than a Mars Bar. Tagging the product chain makes no difference at all. On the whole the food industry is quite likely to give you cancer or heart disease after 10-20 years of chomping through microwave dinners, sugar-soaked cookies et al and quite unlikely to bring you to a sudden end with poisoned baked beans or stewed steak that turns out to have been sourced from a garbage dump in in Azerbajan.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
Cooking for yourself is often healthier and cheaper
While I could debate those points (especially the second one- raw 'organic' ingredients are oft expensive. And, unlike you and me, restaraunts and packaged-food makers buy cheap in bulk, remember), I will just point out the thing you missed:
Cooking for yourself takes time and skill.
I get home, I don't want to run out to the store (you need fresh ingredients, right?), then go home, chop, cut, mix, sprinkle, measure, baste, etc, then cook, then eat. It's a lot easier (and saves a lot of time) to just nuke a TV dinner.
Just think, after digestion, they'll be able to track the food all the way to the sewage plant.
have a mental picture of Fat Bastard when I read the title?
http://organicvalley.coop
*shrug* I had a number of food allergies as a kid. They were things I wasn't supposed to be able to be allergic to. I think MSG was one of them (yes, if I ate a lot of corn or cheese, I had the same reaction...). There were a bunch of things (including some artificial dyes) that multiple doctors said were "impossible" to be allergic to. I always passed the placebo test though---feed me identical-looking, identical-tasting stuff, one with and one without, and you can tell which one had the mystery ingredient.
I don't claim to know why that was. I grew out of it, though, luckily.
-os
Or rather, in a "democracy" the "people that matter" are the ones who sell bar code equipment, RFID tags, and all the expensive equipment who get off their asses and lobby government for this "public protection"... and make billions of dollars off the contracts with the government and those stores.
Now, don't get me wrong, I am sure that RFID suppliers can get some fearmongering from politicians, maybe get 20/20 or Ralf Nadar or some other corporate whore to do an "expose" on why we need the equipment, and get people all riled up like they got for West Nile Virus or violent video games or nukes in Iraq. But that will clearly be after the deal is all working out with the politicians.
And of course it won't do a thing, because people are getting sick from eating Big Macs and potato chips, not from eating tainted food.
"The negative health affects of large sodium intake are real,"
True in effect, not true in underlying fact. As you argue with MSG, salt also naturally occurs in a lot of food (and at high levels in some) as well. But it's a little like arguing that fat or too much sugar is bad; it depends on who you are and what your health is in relation to your intake level.
Large sodium intake has little effect on a healthy individual who listens to their body. What happens with large salt intake to a health person? They piss the excess away. There is a greater risk of dehydration than anything else (people frequently ignore thirst, but even when you just begin to feel thirsty, you have been dehydrated for some time prior).
Heavy salt intake exacerbates blood pressure (which involves a crapload of other issues including but not limited to cardiovascular and kidney health) in *unhealthy* individuals. As such, the real problem is that a huge number of people are not aware that they may or may not have a(n) (underlying) health condition to which high sodium intake has a huge negative health impact on.
Sodium isn't the cause of those underlying problems, but if you don't know about one, sodium intake can lead to greater health problems.
NPR's coverage of the avian flu spreading in Asia and Europe. Granted, food is only part of the issue (the other being influenza epidemic a la 1918), but pretty massive amounts of rural chickens needed to be killed. Not such an issue for commercial chicken raisers (as they keep a closer eye on their stock), but that's exactly what an RFID tag would be good for - making sure the chicken was born and raised at one of the large, well-controlled centers.
The grocery clerk already has the label memorized for produce. She doesn't need the RFID tag.
but the ingredients that shouldn't be in the food just stay untraced. Even if you get apparently 100% percent of all the ingredients traced there'll always be the possibility that someone comes along and puts something additional into your food, e.g. any kind of contamination.
Maybe 6 years ago in Toronto, yogurt was taken off the shelves because it had glass bits in it. As it happened, I knew someone who would know the details. I made the call and this is what I was told (and I can assure you that it's authoritative):
At the time, there were 4 brands (it's shaken up since then). All 4 were made in Toronto by one of the companies. Once made, it was sent to Greece, because the companies derive some benefit for "exporting" it. In Greece, it gets fruit, sugar, colouring, or flavouring (I forget which). Then it gets sent to Scandinavia and the Greek company gets some benefit for "exporting" it. In Scandinavia, something else is done with it and, natch, the company derives some benefit for "exporting" it. Then it gets sent to two other foreign countries, each of which derives some benefit for "exporting" it. Now it's done and it's yogurt and it gets sent back to Toronto. I don't remember if there's a benefit to the manufacturer for "importing" it.
They put it on shelves and begin selling it. But wait! There's glass in it! So they recall it. My informant told me that no one knew even what continent it was on when the glass got into it. So I said, "So this could happen again in 2 months, right?" "Right." Two months later, Torontonians had glass in their yogurt again.
But this insane process will not be curtailed. Instead, they'll get a better idea of who to point the finger at the next time it happens.
I kid you not. The above is the real deal.
At what cost? And what's going to be tagged? Pallets? Individual packages? If you are going to tag the actuall packages themselves you are talking $0.35 each. That cost
would more than likely get passed off to the consumer.
OUCH!
In any fair test, I can tell you whether food contained MSG or not. In fact, I can tell you within 5 minutes at a restaurant whether food I just ate contains MSG or not by my physical reaction.
The fact is, artificial engineered glutamate and natural glutamate are handled by the body very differently. It would be like if Olestra were also called soybean oil and then we were told the body handles soybean oil no problem, which, of course, is a ludicrous statement to then apply that logic to the artificial stuff.
BTW, excitotoxins are among the leading candidates as causes for Alzheimer's http://www.zarcrom.com/users/alzheimers/w-07.html and ALS/Gulf War disease http://www.wnho.net/aspartameandgulfwar.htm.
They have also been documented to cause Multiple Sclerosis symptoms http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/2004/06/10/as partame_and_multiple_sclerosis_neurosurgeons_warni ng.htm and blindness http://health.benabraham.com/html/impotence___blin dness_from_die.html.