By Karen Telleen-Lawton, Noozhawk Columnist | December 17, 2018 | 4:00 a.m.
A healthy Santa Barbara romaine salad.
Why do we have to refrain from romaine and require farmers to plow under hundreds of heads?
A couple of weeks ago, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention broadcasted the dangers of eating romaine lettuce harvested from the coastal regions of Northern and Central California in a certain time period.
The multistate outbreak of E. coli illnesses is still being investigated, but as of Dec 6, 52 people have been infected with E. coli since October. It’s time for cryptocurrency technology to save the day.
What does cryptocurrency have to do with E. coli in produce? Cryptocurrency is electronic cash, whose legitimacy and trustworthiness are based not on the secure walls of a central bank but on an open-book policy.
The ledger is open to everyone, so it’s hard to embezzle because of a technology known as blockchain.
Blockchain is described as a “democratized accounting system made possible by advances in data encryption,” according to Frank Yiannas, vice president of food safety for Walmart.
Walmart, along with top suppliers like Unilever, Nestlé and Danone, is piloting a food-supply blockchain project using IBM technology. They want produce’s journey from farmer to packer, shipper, distributor, wholesaler and retailer to be monitored and verified at each step and available to all.
With a known pathway, problems at the consumer level are quickly traceable to the source, reducing the impact of food-borne pathogens.
Compare this with what the CDC does now to halt outbreaks. The current produce tracking method involves working backward from victim to grocer all the way to the field.
The FDA requires produce be marked with harvest location and stamp or hydroponic or greenhouse information. If targeted produce contains neither, it is tossed. If labeling information shows a provenance outside the tainted area, the produce can be cleared for sale.
Sometimes the process includes coordinating with foreign public health agencies such as Canada or Mexico.
Much of the tracking is still on paper: the process is considered fast when it takes under a week to figure out the source of the produce. It more often takes weeks or months, by which time the food has already been consumed or discarded.
Investigators are charged with tracking about 900 food-borne illnesses each year. A Pew Charitable Trust study showed food-borne illnesses have an economic cost of about $152 billion a year, with produce accounting for a quarter of that.
Yiannas first heard about blockchain in 2016, while Walmart was coordinating the opening of a food safety institute in China. A decade before, a baby food formula adulteration scandal there sickened 54,000 babies.
Intrigued by the idea of instant traceability, Yiannas asked his staff to trace a packet of sliced mango from a Walmart aisle the traditional way.
“I looked at my clock and wrote down the time and date, and I timed them,” he said. “It took them six days, 18 hours and 26 minutes.”
Then he challenged his team to build an experimental blockchain network. This required partners along the chain to agree to contribute information. Then, at a stockholder meeting, he conducted a live system test.
“It wasn’t staged,” Yiannas said. “We had a backup in case the technology failed.”
The test was an amazing success, tracing the mango slice packet in 2.2 seconds.
“Walmart is not chasing blockchain because it’s a new fad or it’s a shiny coin,” Yiannas said. “The romaine incident is a perfect example of a real-world scenario where if tools were available it might be managed a bit more effectively.”
Blockchain technology is sure to improve food safety in the near term. Now the question is, when romaine is safe again, can we buy it with bitcoin?
— Karen Telleen-Lawton serves seniors and pre-seniors as the principal of Decisive Path Fee-Only Financial Advisory in Santa Barbara. You can reach her with your financial planning questions at [email protected]. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are her own.
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