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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.'"
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).
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
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.