Barcodes could reveal your food's credentials
* 16 June 2009 by Mason Inman
* Magazine issue 2712. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
* For similar stories, visit the Food and Drink Topic Guide
WHERE does your food come from? A few years ago,
most consumers were satisfied with a sticker
showing the country of origin. But concerns about
fair trade and the environment, as well as food
safety, are now driving a wave of projects aimed
at tracking food from farm to shopping basket.
Though price is still the main factor determining
the food that people buy, many are demanding to
know more about its source. This is partly due to
a series of recent food safety scandals, from
major outbreaks of salmonella and E. coli to
melamine showing up in baby formula and pet food.
"The public want to know where their food and
other products come from, how they are made, and
whether they contain any 'unhealthful'
contaminants," says Dara O'Rourke, an
environmental policy expert at the University of California, Berkeley.
Ethical and environmental concerns figure
prominently, too. In the US, for example, "a
small but rapidly growing percentage of the
population - perhaps 8 to 10 per cent - are
deeply interested in these issues," says food
policy expert Marion Nestle of New York
University. "Interest in where food comes from is
part of a growing social movement."
Most manufacturers already use barcodes or RFID
chips to track their products. But with the help
of cheap cellphone and internet access it is
becoming possible to collate data from remote
locations around the world and make it available
to the people who are actually going to eat the food.
In many cases manufacturers are alive to the
notion that transparency about the source of
their food is good for business.
<http://www.simedarby.com>Sime Darby, a large
palm oil supplier in Indonesia and Malaysia, is
working with <www.foodreg.htm>FoodReg, a firm
based in Barcelona, Spain, that develops
food-tracking software. The idea is to develop a
system to prove to customers that its crops are
not grown on land recently occupied by tropical rainforest.
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. Tracking 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."
Calculation of food miles and carbon footprint
could be the killer application for traceability
TraceTracker, a Norwegian company formed in 2000
in response to a series of food safety scandals
in Europe, also makes online databases that allow
food to be tracked. It is collaborating with
telecommunications company Intel to track
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halal>halal food.
They hope to develop a cheap mobile phone that
farmers, suppliers and processing houses could
use to load information about the production of
food onto
<http://www.tracetracker.com/cgi/news.cgi?id=233>TraceTracker's
database. Consumers could then use their own
smartphones to check that the food they are
buying comes from a licensed halal source. "It's
much harder to cheat if you have electronic
traceability," says Knut Jörstad, TraceTracker's chairman.
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.
In theory, they say, it should be possible to pin
poultry down to a particular region or county -
useful for customers who want to avoid poultry
from areas affected by bird flu, or who only want to buy locally sourced food.
Meanwhile, an online initiative called the
<http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/C.Wallenta/fairtracingblog/>Fair
Tracing Project aims to publicise how farmers in
poor countries are treated by the multinational
companies that sell their produce in the west.
Farmers use mobiles to upload photos and videos
"so they can tell a story about the labour
conditions they're working under", says Fair
Tracing team member Dorothea Kleine of Royal
Holloway, University of London. Kleine and her
colleagues add this to data on how the goods
travel from farm to store, including the amount
that packagers, shippers, and retailers get paid along the way.
So far they have completed case studies on
Chilean wine (see diagram) and Indian coffee.
Customers in stores should eventually be able to
photograph a product's bar code with their phone,
and be directed to the relevant charts and videos.
There are already several phone applications that
customers can use to check the origins of certain
foods, such as <http://www.goodguide.com>Good
Guide, which ranks products according to
environmental, health and social measures, and
<http://www.enjoymentland.com/locavore>Locavore,
which uses an iPhone's GPS system to detect where
the user is, then displays a list of local foods
that are in season, with locations of nearby farmers' markets.
But that's just the beginning, according to
Jörstad. If the various initiatives start
collecting their data in a standard format, all
the different databases could be linked together
in one huge "internet for food".
<http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227126.500-barcodes-could-reveal-your-foods-credentials.html>http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227126.500-barcodes-could-reveal-your-foods-credentials.html
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