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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
"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."
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
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)