LOCATE YOUR MEAT
April 10th, 2004
OK, this is going to be a bit of a long one. sorry.
I’ve thought quite a lot about what I eat, perhaps initially fuelled by the GM crops debate they made us think about at school, leading into the whole ‘organic’ food scene which seems to have emerged from that. In the past I didn’t agree that GM crops should have to be labelled as such, but now I think it would be useful. To make people realise more about what they eat, and not just ignore it because it isn’t mentioned on the packaging.
This further extends to meat and fish, which nowadays is a much bigger concern for me, especially when considering food quality and food safety. Some months ago I discussed at length with Sophia (a vegetarian) the idea of attaching a photo of the actual animal the meat came from, to every item of meat we buy in the shops. She said it was a sick idea, as if the idea of eating animals wasn’t sick enough, it would be even more sick to acknowledge what the animal looks like, further increasing your perception of eating an animal, rather than just ‘food’. I disagree, but the whole food / animal thing is a whole separate debate.
My reason for wanting a picture is that I think it would encourage people to buy better meat (OK so perhaps it is hard to take pictures of live fish which are not farmed.. so let’s stick with the meat idea here for photos), or rather meat which is reared under better conditions. Would you buy a chicken if, every time you bought it, it came with a picture of it looking ill and crammed into some 1sq metre of space with 200 other chickens? I don’t think I would. You’d be more inclined to buy free range, organic chicken, where the chicken looked happier and like it was actually allowed some dignity during it’s life as a farmed animal.
This was brought back into my head today during an ICQ conversation with Sarah about ‘near’ food, I just bought some venison which was raised in Brockley, just a couple of miles from where I live and I wondered if it was the ‘nearest’ item of meat I will ever have eaten. I’ve eaten near eggs before (in Brighton and even from chickens I have come into direct contact with), but I don’t recall ever having eaten any really near meat, certainly not within a couple of miles.
This idea of near food is great, and something people seem particularly excited about at the moment, with trendy delis and farm shops really going on and on about food being local, which I think is genuinely great. Sarah suggested the idea of near food being like a GeoURL for your food, and suddenly it clicked. Indeed it is interesting to know about your food, interesting and reassuring, and at the same time it feels like a good thing to know you’re buying something local – to help out a neighbour, rather than Tesco‘s preferred farmer for this week (ie the one who offers them chickens for 0.1p less than their next preferred farmer).
A photo, a GeoURL – it is EXACTLY what we need for meat, and why not all the food we eat? Metadata about what we eat would make me very happy. RDF for food. Make it adaptable for the type of food, it would include obvious things like use-by dates, but for meat things like age of animal, diet, any illnesses it had suffered, hell maybe even information about the farm it was raised on and it’s peers. The possibilities are endless and would allow for a much better way of choosing meat. I could decide to sort my meat based on it’s diet, I could decide I would only pay a high price for meat if it had not been significantly ill during it’s life.
For fish I would always know about the origin of a fish (it’s not always clear, whether a fish was farmed or not), metadata about non-farmed fish would be harder, age and so on would be difficult, but date of catch would be useful, where it was caught etc. all possibilities.
I’ll think more about this. But given so many recent food scandals which keep hitting the media in the UK, I think something like this is long overdue.
3 Responses to “LOCATE YOUR MEAT”
1tomment » busy new year
January 10th, 2005 @ 00:10
[...] by david. and just now i’ve launched a little online presence for my response to the dream i had in april 2004. Description of a Food Item gets a home, although there [...]
2Sarah » metadate your cows
April 10th, 2004 @ 22:11
[...] te your cows
Filed under: General — sarah @ 10:10 pm
You have to read Tom’s latest post about developing more transparent ways of farming. There are good ideas there, goo [...]
3tomment » Finding local food
May 5th, 2006 @ 11:37
[...] I like the idea of local food. [...]
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