Meet Your Meat
It’s no secret that most goods complete a long journey before reaching their final destination, and your dinner ingredients are no exception. The average food item in the United States travels 1,500 miles from farm to fork. That distance has led many consumers to wonder: Just who grew my food? The answer may be a ...
It's no secret that most goods complete a long journey before reaching their final destination, and your dinner ingredients are no exception. The average food item in the United States travels 1,500 miles from farm to fork. That distance has led many consumers to wonder: Just who grew my food?
It’s no secret that most goods complete a long journey before reaching their final destination, and your dinner ingredients are no exception. The average food item in the United States travels 1,500 miles from farm to fork. That distance has led many consumers to wonder: Just who grew my food?
The answer may be a mere mouse click away. In response to consumer interest, several food companies now offer tracing mechanisms for their products. Dole Food Company has launched a Web site that allows fruit lovers to virtually visit the farms in Central and South America where their bananas are grown. Tracking numbers on the bananas’ stickers lead to photos of the farms’ hairnet-clad banana packers, satellite images of the grounds, and testimonials from locals. "It’s really just a way for us to be as open and as transparent as possible with our consumers," says Marty Ordman, Dole’s vice president of marketing and communications.
Other companies have similar track-and-trace tools that allow consumers to do everything from monitor their still-gobbling Thanksgiving turkey via Webcam to download profiles of Iowa farmers who grew the soybeans for their soy milk. Several supermarkets in Japan have installed computers to allow shoppers to trace vegetables back to the date of harvest and view pictures of the farmers. Inedible products are also getting in on the game. Dutch nonprofit MADE-BY works with clothing brands to include codes on garment labels so consumers can track their T-shirts back to, say, Peruvian cotton picker Carlos Tomas. The aim is to put a personal stamp on an increasingly long-distance production chain.
But some labor activists argue that this access isn’t worth much. "There is nothing about labor conditions on [Dole’s] site [or] whether trade unions are present," says Alistair Smith of Banana Link, a British organization critical of Dole’s labor practices. In other words, those smiling banana packers could be living in a Potemkin village. But at least one thing is clear: Today’s consumers are demanding more banana transparency, and fewer banana republics.
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