Features

Where's the Beef from?

  • June 2004
  • By David Talbot

Electronic and biological tracking technologies could safeguard the nation's food, but the meat industry may be too mired in antiquated practices to buy in.

   

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.

All this information is available because the steaks come from Japanese cattle that have been individually tracked from birth, generally with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags; each of the cows has an ID number correlated with a database entry that documents its birth date, medical history, and movements from feedlot to slaughter, and the results of mandatory mad-cow tests. At slaughter, the ID numbers, and all data linked to those numbers, are passed on to individual boxes of meat.

 

To read the entire article you must log in:

Most of our content — all daily news, blogs, and videos — is free. Magazine stories are paid. To read this story, you must have a subscription or you must use a reading credit. Registration to Technology Review is free and entitles registrants to three free reading credits.

Username or REGISTER
Password  
   
 
Advertisement

MAGAZINE

Can We Build Tomorrow's Breakthroughs?

Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.

Videos

Meet 2011 TR35 Winner Jesse Robbins

More

Advertisement

Technology Review Lists

TR50

Our list of the 50 most innovative companies, including the following:

Siemens

Calxeda

1366 Technologies

BIND Biosciences

More

Advertisement

Facebook

Advertisement