Forbes
What Blockchain Has To Do With Turkey, Romaine Lettuce, And Food Safety
By: Bruce Y. Lee
What would you like with your turkey or Romaine lettuce? Some gravy? Some dressing? How about some blockchain?
Not a block of cheese. Not a sausage chain. But blockchain. The technology and approach that allow you share a database, which is duplicated across a network of many, many, many computers and other devices. This is different from a traditional database that is situated in one central location, owned by one person or organization, and thus more readily hacked or corrupted. Instead, everyone across the network can contribute information to this database without losing ownership of this information and at the same time benefit from all of the information in the database.
So, what then would blockchain have to do with your Holiday turkey and salad? Initiatives such as the IBM Food Trust are trying to use blockchain to help improve food safety, which has been a particularly prominent problem this year. If you haven't heard, there is a continuing Salmonella outbreak linked to turkey and an ongoing Escherichia coli O157:H7 outbreak associated with Romaine lettuce. Since public health officials were not initially able to determine the specific sources of the contamination, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began by warning you to be careful with all raw turkey products and avoid all Romaine lettuce. Public health officials have now scaled back their Romaine lettuce warnings and are now focusing on Romaine lettuce from California. These 2 outbreaks are part of the worst year for reported multi-state food-borne infectious disease outbreaks in recent memory, according to the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) lists.
Conducting food tracings and trying to determine the source of contamination can take considerable time, effort, and resources. The source can be anywhere along the supply chain, the complex system of locations, equipment, vehicles, processes, partners, and people that get food from farms and other origins all the way to your mouth. Well, at least to where you can purchase the food, as your fork may not necessarily be officially part of the supply chain.
No one really wins with food-borne infectious disease outbreaks, except for the bacteria and maybe toilet paper sellers. An outbreak can be very costly for everyone along the food supply chain, ranging from farmers to other suppliers to restaurants (as our study published in Public Health Reports showed) and other retailers. It also consumes public health and health care resources. Then, of course, there are the people who end up getting sick. When given the choice between diarrhea and no diarrhea, most people would choose no diarrhea. Plus, some of these illnesses can have very serious consequences, such as death.
Therefore, it is in everyone's best interest to prevent these outbreaks from happening and identifying the source as soon as possible after contamination occurs to prevent further spread. Two keys to identifying the source are regular monitoring of the food supply chain and rapidly communicating and sharing information. However, this may be easier said than done since the supply chain stretches across wide geographic regions and many different parties who may operate in silos, both proverbial and literal silos.
