Barcode Labels Could Trace Food Origins
Where is the food on your dinner table grown? Up until recently, just a sticker saying ”Made in U.S.A or Mexico” was good enough. Not anymore, or at least as soon as barcodes are a commonsight in grocery stores. With so much concern about fair trade, the environment, organic foods and general food safety, we can now track where the food you eat was truly grown through the food labels.
Although food prices are still the main factor in determining what food people buy, in more recent years there has been a fast growing concern about where the food source is from. Partly due likely to a series of food scandals, such as Salmonella, E.Coli and more have recently tainted our food markets. The public know wants to know where the food products come from, how they are made and the chemicals contained in them.
As of now, most manufacturers or food processors already use RFID chips to track their products shipping around the globe, but now with the help of cheap cellphone technology and wireless internet, we can collect date from the most remote of locations.
In remote regions where farmers don’t have access to computers, they can use cellphones to record onto FoodReg’s online database the time and place the crop was harvested. Systems like this should also make it easy to calculate the distance that goods travel to reach stores, allowing consumers to estimate the greenhouse gas emissions racked up by the transport of their food. “The calculation of food miles and carbon footprint could be the killer application for traceability,” says Heiner Lehr of FoodReg. “The technology is there. If a big retailer puts itself behind this, it could happen very fast.”
Other efforts aim to provide independent information about food in stores. Simon Kelly of the Institute of Food Research in Norwich, UK, and colleagues are using isotope analysis of chicken meat to check where and how the birds were farmed. The ratio of carbon isotopes in the meat shows how much corn the birds were fed relative to other grains, while hydrogen isotopes reveal the amount of rainfall where they were raised. By combining results from these and other isotopes the researchers can so far reliably tell European chickens apart from those raised in Asia or South America, and distinguish between 21 test sites in Europe with 85 per cent accuracy.
