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A GPS tracker attached to the leg of a chicken means "that people who will potentially buy this chicken will know every step this chicken has accomplished," said food historian Robyn Metcalfe.
Jodi Pudge / Radius Images / Getty Images
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Jodi Pudge / Radius Images / Getty Images
A GPS tracker attached to the leg of a chicken means "that people who will potentially buy this chicken will know every step this chicken has accomplished," said food historian Robyn Metcalfe.
Jodi Pudge / Radius Images / Getty Images
Buyers are willing to pay extra for caged, organic or wild ingredients. But how do you know if the chicken you eat has spent a lifetime happily pecking at corn or if your blackberries have been grown locally and are free of pesticides?
Simple. Put a tracking device on it.
It's not as absurd as it sounds, says Robyn Metcalfe, a food historian who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. According to Metcalfe, a GPS tracking system attached to the leg of a chicken means "that people who will potentially buy this chicken will know every step this chicken has made."
ZhongAn Online, a Chinese insurance company, has already equipped more than 100,000 chickens of trackers. The sensors download information, such as the amount of exercise that each chicken gets and what he ate. The company announced that the technology would be installed on 2,500 farms in China by next year.
They are also working on a facial recognition technology so that consumers can one day make sure that the organic chicken that they saw on the farm is the same one that ends up on their plate.
The desire for a more personal relationship with your main course was once a penchant for the humor of television. In Portlandia pilot episode, two guests question their server on the biological good faith of the chicken. To reassure them that their input was not only healthy but happy, their waiter provided them with the biography and photo of the chicken. He called Colin.
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Metcalfe told Lulu Garcia-Navarro, of the NPR, that in reality, many consumers really want to know where their food comes from and are willing to pay for it. It's part of the movement from farm to table.
Driscolls, based in California, is already using tracking technology, the largest distributor of bays for tracking shipments in real time. Metcalfe writes in his book: Food routes: banana growing in Iceland and other stories of food logistics, that consumers can hold their phone with a QR code on the packaging of their berries to see the smiling faces of the family that grew them.
The real push, however, comes from the industrial sector.
"Obviously, they are trying to find ways in technology to reduce risk," says Metcalfe. Suppliers want to validate the safety of food passing through the system. This helps them avoid expensive reminders and public relations nightmares.
The tracking devices can be used to accurately determine which farm has been affected by bird flu or which farm has produced lettuce infected with E. coli. They can also tell you how long the products have been in transit and if they have been exposed to hot temperatures.
According to Metcalfe, a leading food vendor, Walmart, is testing technology on green leafy vegetables, such as spinach and lettuce. The idea is that once the source of contamination is identified, the products can be recalled and destroyed, instead of recalling millions of pounds of meat.
"So, if you have a foodborne illness as we have just seen or an epidemic like the one we just saw with romaine lettuce or raw turkey meat, you can use that technology all over the place. along the supply chain to be really more responsive as to why it happened. "
Metcalfe says the number of producers who would adopt this technology is not yet clear. Those who raise animals on an industrial scale are not really eager to let the public see what is happening on their farms.
"The way you move food through the supply chain is, in fact, your intellectual property," says Metcalfe. "And you may not want to join this technology."
Metcalfe describes this new world as a mixed bag. "The food system could be open to piracy," she warns.
"I am an optimistic about technology," Metcalfe said. "I see it's coming in. He's already here, but how to navigate this kind of tension between openness and sharing and security and trust, it will be really interesting to watch."
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