[Chapter-delegates] Blockchain and Food Tracability

[Johan Jörgensen]

Hi John

I know that chapter - am the chair, though Patrik is of course the one all
know... ;-)

While we have been thinking about this for quite some time, the materia is
really hard to grasp due to its complexity. Everyone tends to talk about
distributed ledgers but it is also on the other aspects you mention such as
the risk of fraud. We started out by saying that we probably need an
identifier that is common (like a UUID) but then the problems start with
the rest of the stack. We have also realized that a crucial part of the
discussion is to inform about the wider implications when food goes
digital, such as what happens when algorithms govern more and more of our
food decisions.

We need more people to think about the solutions!

Best

Johan


On Mon, Oct 1, 2018 at 1:19 AM John Levine <isocmember at johnlevine.com>
wrote:

> In article <
> CAEMuFPT6gOf-HyHBNmhYBuLwaiTn8JCyxrQrPcMF7-Bh8HrbaA at mail.gmail.com> you
> write:
> >-=-=-=-=-=-
> >
> >John, sorry for a stupid question (I'm an economist...), but this is
> really
> >interesting since high costs are a non-starter for large parts of the food
> >chain. What should we use in order to identify and track food objects that
> >is open, cheap/free and secure?
>
> That's a good question.  Since blockchains are not cheap, and are only
> secure under fairly specific and often unrealistic conditions, we can
> save time and ignore them.
>
> I would start by carefully thinking about the various parts of the
> process.  One part is defining the tracking language, data formats,
> dictionaries, and so forth.  That is independent of what sort of
> database they're stored in.
>
> Then I would think about how to associate the food with tracking tags.
> What are the tags physically?  Bar codes?  QR codes?  RFID tags?  How
> are they physically produced and attached to the food?  This is
> another large problem that's independent of the database.
>
> A related issue is how to ensure that the tags are correctly applied
> (the sleazy packer putting clean tags on dirty produce.)  The path
> through shipping and processing is also complex.  You'll often have
> stuff from multiple sources combined and then distributed, e.g., grain
> from multiple farms going into a silo, or meat scraps from multiple
> animals going into a meat grinder, then shipped to multiple places.
> How do you tag that so that the ultimate consumers can track all the
> sources?
>
> Once you've figured all that out, then you can think about the
> database to store it but really, that's the easy part.  For example,
> the cloud databases from vendors like Amazon and Microsoft are
> powerful and cheap and already are set up to enforce update
> permissions to control who can update what entries.  If you want to
> make a public ledger of all the changes, there are plenty of ways to
> do that.  Some are technically blockchains, having hashes link
> entries, but without all of the other bitcoinish baggage.  (I presume
> you know that there were blockchains like this for 15 years before the
> Bitcoin paper.  It even cites some of them.)  These databases are not
> free, but it seems to me there should be some way to share the modest
> cost so rich consumers and producers subsidize poor ones to their
> mutual benefit.
>
> See Patrik Faltrom's note about the Internet of Food SIG, where they
> have been thinking about these issues for years.  I'm sure they would
> welcome new members.
>
> Anyway, this reinforces the oft stated point that if you think
> blockchain is the answer, that tells us you don't understand the
> problem.
>
> R's,
> John
> --
> Regards,
> John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for
> Dummies",
> Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
>


-- 
Johan Jorgensen
johan.jorgensen at gmail.com
+46 735 200 633
www.swedenfoodtech.com
www.foodtechvillage.com
www.smakapastockholm.se
www.linkedin.com/in/johanjorgensen
www.internet-of-food.org
www.fundedbyme.com
www.swedendemoday.com
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