[Chapter-delegates] Blockchain and Food Tracability

[John Levine]

In article <CAEMuFPT6gOf-HyHBNmhYBuLwaiTn8JCyxrQrPcMF7-Bh8HrbaA at mail.gmail.com> you write:
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>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
-- 
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John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
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