Walk into a Jusco supermarket in Yamato, a small city near Tokyo, Japan, and you can glimpse the future of meat. In addition to a conventional bar code, each steak package sports its own ID number. Type the number into the computer sitting on a nearby table, and up pops information about the cow the steak came from: a scanned copy of its negative test result for mad-cow disease and, in case you are interested, its breed and sex, its date of slaughter, and the name of the producer. At some Japanese meat-counter displays, you'll even see a picture of the family that raised the animal.

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