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Privacy Hardware

RFID Tags to Track Your Food 122

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the is-this-pudding-supposed-to-be-crunchy dept.
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.'"
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RFID Tags to Track Your Food More

RFID Tags to Track Your Food

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  • hmmmmph ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Average_Joe_Sixpack ( 534373 ) on Saturday October 15, 2005 @02:45PM (#13798255)
    Why is my Big Mac linking back to a horse farm??
    • :) Exactly!. Here comes the end of McDonalds/BurgerKing/KFC/...
      if only people knew what happened to their favorite cow/hen from the time it was "medically-pleasent put to sleep" in the "farm" till it reached their "low-carb" bun/plate, they would all go vegan :D

      • Re:LOL (Score:1, Funny)

        by heinousjay ( 683506 )
        You know what? I like the cruelty of meat production. It's my belief that the terror a cow goes through before a cruel death in a slaughterhouse releases hormones that make the beef more tender and delicious.

        People by and large don't care and won't go vegan, which is why the movement is a minority and always will be. Sorry, but by all means keep pretending that trying makes a difference!
      • ":) Exactly!. Here comes the end of McDonalds/BurgerKing/KFC/..."

        Make a Vegan drivethrough and I'll be glad to stop going to any of those. I'm a pretty adventurous cook at home, but in the working hours I don't have time to bother.

        "if only people knew what happened to their favorite cow/hen from the time it was 'medically-pleasent put to sleep' in the 'farm' till it reached their 'low-carb' bun/plate, they would all go vegan :D"

        "All"? Ever the optimist. I've seen the videos, read the books, and I still don'
    • More importantly, why are those 12 beers I had leaving the stomach for the asophagus instead of the bladder?
    • McDonald's is actually doing one big thing to help fix the problem. They are using some of their weight in the market to force producers to verify the origin of the beef they use down to the county level. May not sound like much but providing an economic incentive seems to get things done much faster than the gov't simply passing a law.
    • On the less humorous level:

      Horseshit
      Fertilizer
      Grass
      Cow
      Big Mac

      and

      Horseshit
      Fertilizer
      Lettuice/Pickle
      Big Mac

      Or, the less savory, but all too true:

      Animal shit
      Animal feed
      Cow
      Big Mac

      Either way, I'm guessing people only want the last few steps of the food process monitored. Hearing exactly which animal's ass the fertilizer that grew the plant that either makes our food or fed our food fell out of just doesn't appeal to me.

      Imagine if all information was ultimately hyperlinked together. Do we really need to know that
    • The old Jay Leno line comes to mind: "A chicken walked into a McDonalds and ordered a box of Chicken McNuggets. When he opened it he said, 'I find nothing in here that offends me.'"

      Unbelievable.
    • Horse is probably leaner and better for you than beef. It definitly won't have all the hormones in it. If only it wasn't so expensive.
    • Man, that's a good one. Thanks for the laugh.

  • this isn't the only problem with the food chain! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by yagu ( 721525 ) * <{yayagu} {at} {gmail.com}> on Saturday October 15, 2005 @02:45PM (#13798256) Journal

    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 [truthinlabeling.org].

    The RFID idea doesn't address:

    • artificial sweeteners (I am one of the "urban myth" people who gets excruciating migraines if I ingest nutrasweet.)
    • synthesized fats (olestra?) (make sure you're keeping track of the nearest available rest rooms!)
    • MSG (see above) (and read the referenced site, you're likely to be surprised -- the biggest surprise for me was how many different forms MSG takes, i.e., what amounts to MSG can take forms in which the manufacturer is not required to label it. Even more insidious, they can label their product "MSG Free"!)
    • preservatives
    • salts (I'm just guessing, but if you take common foods (mainstream), and by the time you ate the RDA calorie-wise, the sodium that came along for the ride would exceed the RDA by at least a factor of 2)

    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.


    • "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/ [toiletmap.gov.au]

    • Re:this isn't the only problem with the food chain (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Nutrasweet [snopes.com].
      MSG [guardian.co.uk]
      salts [dhmo.org] (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 cl

      • You are absolutely correct when you mention "the dose makes the poison" , which I meant implicitly in my post, i.e., the amounts of the stuff in the foods is the problem.

        Yes there are many natural occurences of MSG, but there are too many foods with exorbitant amounts of the stuff (almost said xorbitol amounts...). And there is much evidence MSG causes symptoms.

        Thanks for the snopes reference on aspartame. I'm already aware there are lots of crazy claims around various chemicals and their effects from i

    • I disagree (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Infonaut ( 96956 ) <infonaut@gmail.com> on Saturday October 15, 2005 @03:15PM (#13798393) Homepage Journal
      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.

      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.

    • Re:this isn't the only problem with the food chain (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Here's a food tip for you: In a pinch, you can use your tinfoil hat as a makeshift saucepan.

    • Re:this isn't the only problem with the food chain (Score:5, Informative)

      by Mashdar ( 876825 ) on Saturday October 15, 2005 @03:36PM (#13798500)
      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).

      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 [wikipedia.org], 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 .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 [wikipedia.org].

      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" [wikipedia.org], 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)
      • 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 th
    • If consumers could have access to the tracking information, they could (potentially) research their foods and find out if the ingredients are coming from someplace known to use potentially harmful ingredients.

      If consumers wanted healthy food, they'd be buying it. They want cheap, tasty food. The easiest way to make food tasty is to pack it with salt and/or sugar. This is not a trend which will be reversed any time soon. Your best bet is to get a catalog from an organic food retailer, buy a bunch of bulk s

      • Adding large amounts of salt and sugar only makes food tasty to those who have been weaned on it - ie Americans.

        When I came to live in this country, I found most foods tasted way too sugary.

        Add sugar to my fresh brewed tea or coffee, and I'll throw it out.

        I never add salt to my food either. And many (most?) shrink-wrapped foods are packed with sugar and salt.

        To us foreigners who weren't accustomed to all that crap, it's disgusting.

        • Your point being ... ?

          So American food tastes disgusting to you. Congratulations. I'm sure a very large percentage of Americans would find the food from wherever you're from to be exactly as repulsive. It's called personal preferences.

          And just as I wouldn't have any sympathy for the American who moved to Tibet and bitched about how foul yak's milk was and how hard it was to get a Hardee's Charbroiled Angus Beef burger, you'll excuse me if I have equally little sympathy for you. In fact less, since I'm quite

    • artificial sweeteners (I am one of the "urban myth" people who gets excruciating migraines if I ingest nutrasweet.)

      Nope, I get bad bad headaches from aspartame. Sucralose doesn't do it, and neither does regular or brown sugar.

    • I get headaches when I eat nutrasweet, also.

      I remember my first try when I was a kid. Happens every time, and always has.

      I avoid artificial sweetners like the plague.

    • 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.

    • you're talking about an entirely different--and already addressed--issue completely. food producers are already required to list the ingredients contained in their products, however, because of poor quality control sometimes unwanted--and unlisted--"ingredients" get into the food product. this allows people to trace it back to the responsible party when there is a production chain.

      secondly, if there are companies that you don't trust or that you dislike due to their business practices then you can avoid bu

    • Don't forget GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms). In Canada (and I think in the US) we don't have the ability to chose between GMO and non-GMO food. The Canadian government has strongly opposed legislation that would require labelling of GMO products as such, so if there is ever an issue with any GMO food, we're the guinea pigs.

      Ah, but the federal experts insist that they have fully tested all the products, and deem them safe.
      So what - federal experts have allowed all sorts of products on the market that

  • But won't RFID tags (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kizzle ( 555439 ) on Saturday October 15, 2005 @02:45PM (#13798257)
    be kinda hard to chew?
    • An RFID tag is small enough that you don't have to chew it.

      But it is a bitter pill to swallow.

      -Peter
    • Well, for one thing for some applications, such as fast food, people don't bother chewing anyway.

      But for another thing, I've said this before and I've said it again;

      Edible RFID tags that lodge in your gut.

      That way, when you waddle into your favorite fast food franchise, the door-mounted RFID tag readers will determine your usual meals and, before you've even staggered as far as the counter, your favorite happy meal is ready for you.
    • Let's not get silly. RFID tags are still far too expensive to use at the small scales of individual food containers, although I have seen one demonstration at a trade show of putting them on individual Cocoa Krispies boxes.

      They're basically barcodes that can be read from across a room, nothing more complex or powerful than that. They're potentially very useful for tagging expensive containers to be able to track where the box came from: or to track shipping of food where adulteration is a big deal, such as

  • Genetic Engineering... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by michaelzhao ( 801080 ) on Saturday October 15, 2005 @02:45PM (#13798259)
    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

  • It was about time!

    I just hope that the next time I drag a cow out of a shop the alarm doesn't go off.

  • I'll believe that when they demand proper labeling for GM contamination and other artificial ingredients.

    • I'll believe that when they demand proper labeling for GM contamination and other artificial ingredients.

      The EU has required that GM food be labelled as such since April 2004. [food.gov.uk]

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • What recent food security scares? I'm pretty sure I'd see something sensational about it on FOX if there were any and I have not.
    • NPR's coverage [npr.org] of the avian flu spreading in Asia and Europe. Granted, food is only part of the issue (the other being influenza epidemic a la 1918), but pretty massive amounts of rural chickens needed to be killed. Not such an issue for commercial chicken raisers (as they keep a closer eye on their stock), but that's exactly what an RFID tag would be good for - making sure the chicken was born and raised at one of the large, well-controlled centers.

  • Please note: (Score:4, Insightful)

    by saskboy ( 600063 ) on Saturday October 15, 2005 @02:52PM (#13798293) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • I thought all cattle were already uniquely tagged with ear-tags. Guess I was wrong.

      The only reason to go from ear-tag to RFID is that it MIGHT be more cost-effective: RFID may save more money than it costs when it comes to things like moving large numbers of cattle quickly while keeping an "eye" on each and every one of them.
      • This is true. I don't know whether all cattle are RFID tagged, but I'm sure that they've all got some sort of tags. They need to, in order to identify which farm they came from, etc. It serves essentially the same purpose that skin brands used to.

        The proposal here is to maintain the tagging all the way through the food production chain, so the cows are tagged, the sides of beef that come out of the slaughterhouse are tagged, the ground meat from the packing plant is tagged, the hamburger patties are tagged.
        • Almost all cattle is tagged. The few that arn't are usually on small ranches where the owner can tell his 8 head apart just by sight. In those cases branding is still used keep things sorted out if one jumps a fence. Yes, a 1 ton bull can jump a 5 foot fence when it wants to get to the neighbor's heifer.

          The problem is that this tag information is usually only kept by the individual producers. Sometimes by state vets. The trick now is to pull all this information together at the state and national level. The

  • You get sick after drinking bad milk... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Enter the latitude/longitude from the RFID into your GPS and go beat the crap out of the cow that produced the milk yourself!

  • New waiter jokes (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 15, 2005 @02:55PM (#13798304)
    "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."

  • food is temporary (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Barbarian ( 9467 ) on Saturday October 15, 2005 @02:56PM (#13798317)
    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.

  • I'm as concerned... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Mistshadow2k4 ( 748958 ) on Saturday October 15, 2005 @02:56PM (#13798318) Journal
    ... 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.
    • Well, this will allow you (or more likely your retailer) to verify that, for instance, the cow was raised organically. This sort of thing is now quite common in the EU.
  • 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.
    • 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
      • Or rather, in a "democracy" the "people that matter" are the ones who sell bar code equipment, RFID tags, and all the expensive equipment who get off their asses and lobby government for this "public protection"... and make billions of dollars off the contracts with the government and those stores.

        Now, don't get me wrong, I am sure that RFID suppliers can get some fearmongering from politicians, maybe get 20/20 or Ralf Nadar or some other corporate whore to do an "expose" on why we need the equipment, and g
    • Yes, that's true. Just watch Super Size Me or go out in public and you'll pretty much see people not caring about the food they eat. Hell, all of the recent stores built here (Targets, Walmarts) have either a McDonald's or Taco Bell, sometimes a misc. pizza place right inside the store.

      But there are people that do care and want to know where their food has been. While I wouldn't necessarily go that far, I'd definitely like to know more about the chemicals involved and any other artificial additives. There

    • 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
    • not everyone eats at mcdonalds. I sure as hell don't. And I like the idea of there being more traceability and accountability in the food chain. I'd like to be 100% sure when I pay extra for a free-range chicken thats it really is free range, for example.
  • 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
  • Crunchy. BZZT! And shocking.

  • Great (Score:5, Funny)

    by Comatose51 ( 687974 ) on Saturday October 15, 2005 @03:09PM (#13798369) Homepage
    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.
  • This won't happen any time soon in the US. And here's why I say that.

    This past session, there was a bill in both sides of Congress that would have required all meat products to be labled as to their country of origin, etc. The industry lobby made sure the bill died. Apparently us 'mericans are too damned stupid to be trusted with such information. They don't want us to know where the meat in our burgers come from.
    • Well, yeah, Americans would not want to eat food coming from foreign countries like New Mexico...

    • it is already here. (Score:2, Informative)

      by VikingDBA ( 446387 )
      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 bi
  • In Canadian McDonald's, FOOD tracks YOU!

  • Already widespread in Japan (Score:3, Informative)

    by sakusha ( 441986 ) on Saturday October 15, 2005 @03:27PM (#13798456)
    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).
    • I never listen to "such and such is bad, return it to the store" because I usually only buy perishables within a day of when I plan on cooking them. By the time the recall is issued, I have long since eaten and disposed of the remains of whatever it was that could kill me. So I'd almost rather not know.
    • "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. "

      I think that is a great idea for what happens in Japan. Maybe this is a better reason to implement this system in the US/Canada,etc. as well. To implement the system because we can not trust large corporations seems to be spend
    • yes, i very much want to know [not kidding].
  • This will cuase tons of problems for the small to medium size american farmer. They are trying to do the same thing with cattle. This has the potential to cause many americans to loose their ways of life. Farming is already a negative growth industry, and prices are still near those of the 1950's. If you start adding in tons more cost to the process, many of these small family businesses will go belly up and the people running them will loose the only thing they have ever known to do.
  • 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
  • Because if there's one thing we really need to know, it's where that fly in our soup has been prior to landing there.

  • Belgium ~8 years ago (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Councilor Hart ( 673770 ) on Saturday October 15, 2005 @04:34PM (#13798841)
    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.
  • Hmm, who is going to pay my dentist bill for biting on the RF ID Tags?
  • On the 28th of January 2002 the European Parliament and the Council adopted Regulation (EC)178/2002 laying down the General Principles and requirements of Food Law.

    The General Food Law [eu.int] mandates tracking and tracing of all food produced in the EU.

    And as far as I know the Dutch [dymos.nl] are leading within Europe.

  • ...It comes from the store.

    The agriculture dealers already run complete Supply Chain Management. They don't need RFID to track these food packets. This is just an RFID publicity stunt, exploiting people's fear of recent food product unsafety problems. Rather than fix the cannibalistic cycle of feeding animal byproducts back to the same species, which amplifies diseases - even tiny disease signals like previously innocuous prions - they're throwing RFID at it. Which makes it even more manageable to entrench
  • want to know exactly what is in their food - I am telling you what: RFID tags!

  • This is all a little hypocritical. People may say they want to know what's in their food, but very often they don't. If they did, chances are they'd never eat fast food or a ready-meal again. What they want is the convenience of mass-produced food while also feeling that it's good for you. Unfortunately the two are often contradictory. So we enter a little game in which supermarkets are told to reduce the salt and/or sugar and fat in their products, for example, but on the whole fail to do so because if the
  • Just think, after digestion, they'll be able to track the food all the way to the sewage plant.
  • have a mental picture of Fat Bastard when I read the title?
  • Hrm..funny, Organic Valley (one of the only true producers of organic foods) has a feature on their website which allows you to view one of their products, enter in it's date, and you can see exactly what farmer it came from.

    http://organicvalley.coop

  • At what cost? And what's going to be tagged? Pallets? Individual packages? If you are going to tag the actuall packages themselves you are talking $0.35 each. That cost
    would more than likely get passed off to the consumer.
    OUCH!

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