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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.'"
I'll believe that when they demand proper labeling for GM contamination and other artificial ingredients.
What?
... 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.
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.
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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?
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."
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.