From field to fork: Food-tracing system needed

[rpannier]

WASHINGTON - When there's an urgent need to trace fruits and vegetables in a crisis like the salmonella outbreak, a lot of the pieces for a rapid-response system are in place. But nobody has quite figured out how to put them together to operate seamlessly in the vast American marketplace.

The salmonella outbreak has set off a scramble among industry, regulators and lawmakers to devise a system that would allow food to be traced quickly through a serpentine supply chain that spans nations and continents.

snip

In the salmonella case, investigators were slowed by having to sift through batches of paper records at multiple facilities that handle packing and distribution. It got even more complicated because tomatoes from different farms in widely separated locations are routinely mixed together for shipping to markets. Disease detectives were unable to find a single contaminated tomato, though they did find the outbreak strain of the bacteria on a jalapeno pepper.

It needn't be that complicated. In Canada, for example, ranchers can produce a FedEx-style report showing farms, auction pens and feed lots their cattle stopped in from birth to slaughterhouse — a technology now being adapted for some U.S. produce farms.

link:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25851415

[Speck Tater]

1. If a person buys tomatoes

grown locally, there would be no need. We wouldn't have large concentrated suppliers contaminating the entire nation in one swoop. If a local farm has a problem, it might effect a dozen people, but not millions nationwide.

A centralized food system is a fragile, brittle food system.

[monmouth]

2. Anyone remember the Dept. of Agriculture? Back in the day

this department was on top of it all, you had no fears...Wow, the times sure have changed.

[rpannier]

3. That would be pre-Reagan

When people actually paid closer attention to what went on outside of their little bubble.