We missed this article in The New York Times over the weekend, but reader mschatelaine gave us the heads up in our most recent Open Thread. The story is about one company's mission to help customers connect with the farmers who grow and harvest their food. It's not only educational for us as consumers; it also holds companies accountable. More eyes on the source equals fewer shortcuts and unhealthy practices (we hope).
A while ago we wrote about Murray's putting tracking codes on their chickens. And this new article mentions a few other companies doing something similar.
Is it a gimmick? Or a new trend?
Stone-Buhr Flour is the company behind the Find the Farmer website. They decided to highlight the farmers who are growing the wheat. Customers type in their flour's code and can read all about the people behind it. You can even ask the farmers questions. It's like a virtual greenmarket.
Apparently Dole has codes on their organic bananas, allowing customers to learn about the farms in Central and South America that grow the fruit. Granted, the company can put whatever they want on the website—smiling employees, clean factories... But it's still a step in the right direction, connecting us eaters with the people who grow our food. Just having a mental link helps us make more conscious decisions about what we're putting into our mouths, and, if this becomes the norm, we think it will keep companies more honest.
• Read the article: Forging a Hot Link to the Farmer Who Grows the Food, from The New York Times
• Visit Find the Farmer
Related: New Trick: How to Track Your Chicken Back to the Farm
(Image: FindtheFarmer.com)
Everything is traceable--even melamine in baby formula--it took awhile to find it but I believe that the individuals responsible are awaiting their capital punishment somewhere in China.
Our big business considers traceability to be a top priority. If there is an ecoli outbreak from hamburgers at McDonald's that ground beef will be traced all the way back to its origins.
I guess we can look at "find the farmer" in a couple of different ways. On the one hand it's nice to know where your food came from but on the other hand you may find out that it came from a lot, a battery farm or destitute country. Either way, it's nice to know that traceability is becoming more transparent to the consumer.
The situation is interesting to me. Hypothetically speaking, if we were to think on a local level we wouldn't have to look anything up because we'd know this or that came from a particular farm in the area. But as our food production process spans across the country and even from country to country (some ingredients from one country some ingredients from another) we need to know where everything came from for liability and public safety issues.
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I think this is great! Industry is waking up to the fact that people are actually interested in where their food comes from. More traceability leads to more transparency and ultimately more power on the part of the consumer to dictate how they want their food to be grown, handled, packaged, and delivered.
@art-while I agree with your sentiment, if we all ate locally I would never get to eat anything with wheat in it, or salt for that matter...
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