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IBM Tracks Pork Chops From Pig To Plate
dcblogs writes "IBM is deploying technology in China that allows meat suppliers to track a single pig all the way from farm animal to pork chop. Pigs are initially identified with a barcoded ear tag. This identification is then put on bins used to track the various pig parts as they pass through the slaughterhouse, processing plant, distribution center and finally to the clear plastic-wrapped package in a grocer's case. If a consumer buys three pork chops in a package, 'you know that these three pieces of pork chop came from pig number 123,' said Paul Chang, who leads global strategy for emerging technologies at IBM. The goal is to control disease outbreaks, but theoretically this technology could allow a grocer to put a picture on the store package of the pig you are eating."
I would like a more stylish ear tag when you start doing this on humans, please.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
See Porky, eat Porky
then no way in hell they'd implement a picture.
anyhow, this isn't really news is it? except that they're bothering with this in china(to have a meat supply track where the meat isn't binned to a single big bin at some point in the process).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
So THAT'S what IBM is doing now.
"...theoretically this technology could allow a grocer to put a picture on the store package of the pig you are eating."
No thanks. I like to feel a personal disconnection with the animal I'm about to eat. Lobsters aren't so bad because they're like bugs, but many people keep furry animals like pigs as pets. The idea's like a local radio commercial that advertises lambskin boots and then plays a cute "Baaaaa" noise, which is quizzical and bizzarre.
Everytime that commercial comes on at work I say, "That is the sound of the lamb being slaughtered to make those boots."
Does Douglas Adam's estate get to sue if we get an introduction of our pork by our pork?
The goal is to control disease outbreaks, but theoretically this technology could allow a grocer to put a picture on the store package of the pig you are eating.
As if a grocer would actually do this (unless forced by a pack of wild PETA activists).
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theoretically this technology could allow a grocer to put a picture on the store package of the pig you are eating
Considering how disconnected the average person is from where their food comes from, I think putting a face on the meat you're buying would turn many people's stomachs -- and maybe turn them off eating meat. Oh well, more bacon for the rest of us!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Generally speaking, it's probably a bad idea to put a face to the meat, unless you're with PETA.
Sometimes, the idea of becoming a vegan is really appealing.....
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Finally, a real choice!
That's some pig!
Yeah, I don't think seeing the face that used to carry that porkchop around seems like a very appetizing idea.
Sounds incredibly like hollerith punch card technology that was used to track death camp and labor camp prisoners from abduction to death.
Did IBM make those as well?
that tracked pig parts from the country clubs and corporate jets to the PAC offices to the K-street lobbyists and think tanks to the Washington Nationals sky boxes and Capitol Hill lunch spots to the Congressional cloak rooms.
"He liked spiders, and was a pretty stupendous pig."
-JWR
IBM has WAAAAAAAAY too much time on its hands.
For discrete cuts of meat, the labeling should be simple enough; but some of the more, er, 'waste minimizing' meat products are going to get seriously complex.
The composition of a given hamburger would probably have to be given as a joint probability density function across a set of hundreds or thousands of animals or something similarly messy. That would give label-readers something to ponder...
The more things change, the more they stay the same...
Would anyone be surprised if IBM has a patent on this? Remember, I am talking about the USPTO here. We've seen that in the past.
It would be a waste of technology if it didn't make bacon taste even better.
I wonder what the "came from" list would look like on a package of htodogs.
They did the same thing in 1930's/40's Germany. I guess the more that things change, the more that they stay the same.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
But IBM's tech worked with numbers burned on forearms.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Americans don't want to see the face of the pig they are eating, In fact most don't want to hear how you kill and process and animal. Putting a photo of the pig on the package will guarantee a drop in sales.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The FDA is trying to do something similar here in the U.S. Cost / Benefit and regulating small farmers is the problem.
They want the data for public health reasons. When there is an outbreak to disease (tuberculosis, salmonella) or contaminated meat the FDA would like to track the outbreak to the source. So, while it is kind of pointless to know where your hamburger came from (the packages in the local supermarket come from 1 or 2), not so much for the public health people.
Time to meet the meat!
Track it back to its facebook page and post a message - "You were delicious"
We've been doing this in Europe for quite a few years now...
Now that's what they really need to be tracking...
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"This little piggy went to market"
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PETA would have us believe animal farms and nazi death camps are morally equivalent.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I think we should do more to honor the creatures we eat. There is no greater sacrifice than for a creature to give its life to sustain the life of another. Instead of the nihilism vegetarians would desire for our fellow creatures, I say we give these creatures life, a good life, then celebrate that life as we dine on their flesh. So yes, give us a picture and bio of our creatures.
"Written on the pages is the answer to the never ending story..."
Many years ago there was a similar article about Ben & Jerry's ice cream doing the same kind of ingredient-to-finished-product tracking. It described how say, complaints in Cherry Garcia ice cream can be traced by batch # to the source of the cherries, cream, etc to help pinpoint the problem in quality. For a long time people had been wanting things like this for food safety. Past steps to get the ball rolling in the livestock industry are stalled on practical matters such as tagging things like yes.. Individual chickens. The obvious complaint is that it costs too much money for farmers/ranchers to tag all of these animals. Humorously the farmers joke that the politicians want them to tag the chickens in their ears... which chickens do not have.
Everyone know that the part of IBM operating in Germany worked with the government of the time helping with some of the most heinous institutionalized in human history. However, there is a good chance you can't find a single person currently in IBM's employ who was even *born* when that was happening. Implying that IBM continues to be a company worthy of scorn even now due to this is not that far off from calling Germany a despicable country. We must never forget and specific examples of how organizations were complicit in the whole thing helps to keep perspective, but in any way implying the IBM of *today* has any blame for what was done by people who have no invlovlement in IBM at all anymore is not productive.
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This sounds very similar to the cattle passport system that was setup in the UK after the BSE outbreak, if taken a stage further. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Cattle_Movement_Service/
"... theoretically this technology could allow a grocer to put a picture on the store package of the pig you are eating."
Yeah, that would sell so many more packages. Reminds me of the friends who decided to raise their own Thanksgiving Turkey. (Who did not get eaten at Thanksgiving, and is now spending its retirement years in the country, at the friends' expense.)
I believe chefs in Japan can select a cow on the web with details of its history etc. It is then killed, butchered and the meat is shipped to them direct. The beef is specifically bred for Japanese tastes, marbled with fat etc.
Isn't this just plain old lot tracking?
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
Wow! IBM finally figured out how to make money out of pig painting!
If this were easy, they wouldn't need us to do it!
If the package says "Pork"? With with the quote marks, I mean...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Dibs on pig 1024.
Yeah riiiight...
You trust about two dozen people, handling all those pigs/pork, labeling them, etc, on saying that they came from pig number 123.
People in horrible work conditions, who naturally will do trickery if it means they can make some extra money and eat something better than rice with rice tomorrow.
People who might sell you fake rice made from plastic and cellulose, fake eggs made from the same stuff as flubber, and fake USB drives. (And given their situation, you can't even blame them.)
Exactly. That's how stupid this sounds It's the "reliable sources" syndrome from Wikipedia all over again.
Total ignorance of the only guaranteed fact: That you have not observed it for yourself, but rely on "sources", whose trustworthiness is different for different people, and who themselves has an inherent, inevitable filter bias in their senses, their brains, and their communication media.
Stupid, stupid, stupid!
They had an ad campaign a while back where they equated eating a chicken sandwich to killing someone in the Holocaust.
When PETA does that, they are actually endorsing the Holocaust. Since there is nothing morally wrong with eating a chicken sandwich, there must be nothing morally wrong with the Holocaust, since they equate the two.
We are a small family farm - we raise our pigs outdoors without locking them up. We feed them grain, but also hay, whey from a nearby dairy, and windfall apples from a local orchard. My customers know exactly where their meat comes from, I get more for my product than most farmers do, and they get a savings by buying a far superior product directly from me without having to pay for all the transportation and advertising costs in the supermarket. It's awesome. Seriously - go find a farmer who will let you meet the meat and only by from them forever. You won't regret it.
SAP has been doing it as a matter of course. I don't even see how IBM got into this ERP like task, but I didn't RTFA.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR2ydWY3YNM&feature=youtube_gdata_player
'you know that these three pieces of pork chop came from pig number 123.' Oh great, they tell you how it ends, in the summary already. Where's the fun in that? :(
Here's the secret to immortality:
I'm just waiting for the first lawsuits file by people who don't remove the RFID tags...
Unless you eat at mcdonalds, then they need to post pictures of the 953 animals that you are eating, since they are all mashed together.
Apple Style!
This has been obligatory for all meat exported from Argentina to abroad for very, very long. I think since the early ninetees.
I'm pretty sure brazil does the same, only with more colorful tags.
IBM already has a heritage of tracking Jews from home to incinerator, so why not track pig flesh from farm to plate?
Somebody's got a patent on tatooing people with invisible ink. :D
I would have to start mailing PETA pictures of my lovely steaks.
A recently published book details IBM's role in supplying Nazi's with technology to track humans through their final stage of their lives.
Hollerith punch cards, hmmm????
Seriously wtf????
If you can't trust your brokerage firm to segregate your money from theirs, and you can't trust the regulators to make sure they do, how can you trust factories and farms in China and the Chinese regulators that those three pork chops really come from pig 123 ( and not from melamine batch 456 ) ???
This kills the crab/pig.
Can they track the pork in government?
I don't want to eat a single thing from there.
I have seen it with my own eye.
I wont even feed dog food to my dog from china.
Much less my family.
You better arsenic test every thing.
The shit is in your rice now.
Keep buying parts, match them on part number and recover the full "frame".
What would you write by the picture?
Have you seen me? No, and now it's too late! You're never going to see me. Well, not all of me, not in one place.
No brain, no pain.
I live in china for a while now and pork aswell as beef are often cause for concern here. The Pigs get fed antibiotics en mass. They sometimes have a fatlayer of 2-3" which is compared to the pigs in germany (1" at MOST) monstrous. I dont know about yankee pigs but i heard they use antibiotics too.
The good thing is that the farmers wont be able to remain anonym and they maybe start shifting their opinions on AB`s
Another good thing is that i can finally see the animal while eating it....good times.
Let me know when they start tracking the pork chop from plate to the city sewage treatment plant.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Rather than the pig's mugshot, I'm more interested in the conditions the pig lived in it's entire life.
Three words, well know to vietnamese, some other asians, and also some soul food connoisseurs: "picked pigs ear". The body may go one way, and the tagged ears another.
Well that story is all good and nice but except for one place in town here (I'm in China) *nowhere* is meat
wrapped in plastic. you pick pieces on the stand, handle it, get it cut, but the customer is never gonna see
any wrapping or label for his meat. And any cooking will be done thoroughly to avoid getting sick !
Yet another piece of "IT news" absolutely disconnected from reality, don't get to excited !
A picture of the pig at the butcher's is fine... but I don't want to see the animal at a (stereotype) Chinese restaurant! :-)
Meat packages have QR codes which link to a complete record any nationally raised "meat" when it was still alive, including the farm it was raised in and medical records. Restaurants started displaying the QR codes prominently when the American BSE scare occurred, and the reception was so good many places display information on all the vegetables as well... though granted the information is not nearly as thorough as the meat.
..you can only follow the ear down to the plate.
So they finally fond a use for all that Jew tracking software they developed back in the 30s.
This is a company I can't bring myself in good conscience to invest in. First there's the "billable hours" business model of selling catastrophic, but expensive, IT deployments 700 million here : http://www.govtech.com/health/IBM-and-Indiana-Suing-Each-Other.html 800 million here: http://offthekuff.com/wp/?p=29689
Then there's the sad recycling of 60s-era AI techniques to a gullible public in the form of first the chess playing Big Blue and more recently the Jeopardy computer, neither of which was as it appeared. The Big Blue had a preternatural advantage over Gary Kasporov in that it could look at Gary's previous games and study his game play while Gary could not do likewise.
Jeopardy appears to be a computer thinking about just any subject in the world when in fact it's a pile of loose associations in a database with a front end which can parse the highly stereotyped, and therefore highly predictable, style of "speech" Alex Trebeck asks Jeopardy questions in well enough to get at what the what the question is, some form of Find an X with properties (or associations with strength greater than 7 to ) A B and C.
It is easy to design the questions so they are virtually the same questions to the humans but throw the computer off completely. We had computers doing accurate medical diagnosis (MYCIN) in the 70s with 70s hardware. Puh-lease.
Then there's that little issue of the Holocaust and Hitler which some people just haven't forgotten. If there was ever a case where a corporate charter should have been revoked on account of moral depravity and a depraved indifference to society's values, this was it. http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/ Long story short: Watson had full knowledge of what was happening and the American headquarters signed off on everything.
This is what IT becomes when amoral business majors are at the helm and seek profit however they can, through false and misleading representations, through the IT equivalent of cheap parlor tricks, and through mass murder. This is a company whose long term culture is fundamentally irredeemable both morally and technically.
are belong to us.
They really will be putting lipstick on a pig.
On this side of the pond, we're busy tracking where the things on our dinning plate came from.
On the other side, you're busy tracking worker/civilians/people.
To each his priorities.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Don't worry, in the USA, the same technology will be recycled to help the government track people instead.
You still won't know what mystery meat went into the burger you're eating, but the government will precisely know all the people who handled it before you, and with whom they were all interacting during the past 2 years.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
FTS ... theoretically this technology could allow a grocer to put a picture on the store package of the pig you are eating.
Yesterday's Weirdness is Tomorrow's Reason Why
The website, http://www.thisfish.info tracks seafood from ocean to plate. With ThisFish, a consumer can bring home a wild salmon from the supermarket and look up where and when it was caught and by whom. Traceable, transparent food sources.