Fri, 05 Mar 2004

A Plea for a Transparent Burger

Interesting piece on tracking livestock from a food safety perspective. As a producer, I'd be more than willing to participate in a program like this.

Here's how it might work. Mothers of food animals would get DNA-fingerprinted; offspring would receive an identification number. The producer would keep a database, accessible to anyone over the Web, tracking the burger-to-be according to what the calf ate, what health concerns it faced, and what herds or ranches it came into contact with. An ear tag or an implanted radio-frequency ID chip would keep things simple. In the end, even plastic-wrapped cuts of beef in your Safeway would be labeled with its ID number. People with Web access near their dinner tables could actually read about what they were chewing. Morbid? Maybe, but it beats finding out some years later that your brain is melting.

Follow that cow! Tracking beef from birth to plate is the only way to guarantee its safety. By Don Tapscott from Wired magazine.

(link) [Wired News]

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