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