WHAT'S IN YOUR BURGER?

摘要

All those opposed to eating mystery meat, say neigh. Consumer confidence in packaged foods hit a low when horsemeat was found in ready meals in the UK. Companies including Birds Eye and Nestle were forced to withdraw some of their products from sale. Could smart packaging prevent history repeating itself? One idea is to use radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology - labelling things with small chips that store data and can be tracked. Bob Newman at the University of Wolverhampton in the UK recently led a European Union "Farm to Fork" project to use such tags in food labels, allowing consumers to check where their food comes from. A RFID label on a pack of ham, for example, allows the meat to be traced not only to a particular factory, but also to an individual animal labelled with an ear tag.