Skip to main content

An Easter Egg in Winter

I had my first experience today with the emerging new technology of labeling individual food items in order to make them traceable. I opened a carton of eggs from Giant supermarket, picked up an egg to make my breakfast (my favorite fried egg and leftover dressing concoction). I noticed some writing in gold ink on my egg. An Easter Egg! WooHoo! And then I thought, perhaps it is one of those crazy internet projects where people put writing on things directing you to a website to track it. Like a garden gnome, a book or paper money. No, it said "Best by" and a date. Aha, I recognized it was an example of the individual food item labeling I'd heard about and seen demonstrated on television.

I checked the egg carton hoping there would be some information about the code on the egg. Yes, the carton directed me to a a website where I could find out more information about my egg: giantfreshegg.com (or you can go to http://www.myfreshegg.com/ for other brands), which redirects to a site where I can enter the code and sell by date into a web form to identify and trace my egg. I entered the code. A page displaying information about my egg appeared: "Key Egg Dates;" the date my egg was processed, the sell by date; "Your Egg Information;" told me my egg came from Hillandale Farms, which I know to be a large industrial egg producer.

The numbers and letters printed on my egg are called a "Freshness and Traceability Code." This is an attempt by industrial agriculture to satisfy consumer demand for knowing where their food comes from, which is gaining popularity with greater concern for food quality, ethics and safety. It is one more way that large scale agriculture hopes to compete with small, independent and organic farms. The company behind this (laudable) technology is http://www.eggfusion.com/

I welcome measures increasing the traceability of food, especially in the industrial agriculture and processed foods realm, where for example, one bad leaf in a field of spinach gets mixed up in tens of thousands of bags, inoculating them with bad bugs and the industrial system spreading them out over the country. When people bought lettuce by the head, only one person might be sickened by a bad head, but chop the lettuce head up, bag it and distribute it to tens of thousands of people and you have a new problem created by the efficiency of industrial agriculture. Yes, it's convenient, but is it sustainable? We need to know where our food comes from whether from big factory farms or small organic ones, in order to make choices about the advantages and disadvantages of factory farms and factory foods.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reading Tweets

I see a new kind of writing being created on Twitter, including hashtags, mixed into the text, in a variety of creative ways. In future, we should see a system that allows users to make these kind of connections, but without needing to include obscure computer-like commands in their text. I sometimes feel I'm reading a Linux command line or script when reading some tweets. Sometimes, it takes a moment to figure out what the tweet means.
Post a Comment
Read more

Traditonal Publishers Still Hidebound

"The idea that something that appeared in print is automatically worth paying for is nonsense." says Mark Coatney in Evaluating Time Magazine's New Online Pay Wall This is an example of thinking from the traditional publishing world, where if something made it into print or was "published" it meant the content with through a lengthy process of adding value and checking quality, through the editorial, fact-checking and proofreading process. This was thought in the olden days to mean something. Yes, it did, but not always. That editors and fact-checkers were available or that they had a hand in content did not necessarily mean puff-pieces, fabricated stories, falsehoods, mistakes, typos never made it into that published content polished to shine like your grandmother's counter tops. Publishing was a measure of trust and quality from the pre-network world. The network has a new set of criteria and indicators of trust and quality. I find that often writers who
Post a Comment
Read more

Snowball, the Dancing Bird

A video of a dancing bird has become the latest YouTube sensation. Some people thought the bird's performance was faked, but for me, it is not surprising, given the sophisticated ability birds demonstrate for manipulating pitch and rhythm in their songs, that a bird shows the ability to keep time with music. Neuroscientists, including John Iversen of the Neurosciences Institute, have studied the dancing bird and confirm it is capable of extracting a beat from sound. What impressed me most about Snowball's performance is when he lifts his leg and gives it a little shake before bringing it down. As the investigators mention, it may be prompted by the pace being too fast to put his foot all the way down in time with the faster beat, but it piques my curiosity further. It appears Snowball is dividing the beat when he waves his foot, into two or three little waves, which if I am seeing it correctly, suggests birds are capable of division of the beat and perceiving and manipulating
Post a Comment
Read more