“This Can of Beans Killed Fifty-Eight Polar Bears.”
In an era when we can’t stop hearing about food prices rising at the fastest rate on record, useless environmentalists have come up with yet another way to stick it to the poor: embedding computer chips in food packaging to connect consumers to an online “sustainable food guide” via cell phones!
The guides would help consumers navigate their way through the ethical and ecological decisions about what they eat, the proponents argue.
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Information on socio-economic and environmental criteria could be presented simply through “food flowers” – diagrams where each petal represents a different impact, with the shaded area of a petal showing how highly a food item scores.
The more detailed information could be accessed from a website and uploaded from food packaging to our mobile phones.
I wonder if anyone has bothered to think about how much the price of food is going to go up when the government starts requiring that microchips be embedded in every food package, how much it’s going to cost set up and run the infrastructure necessary to store information about countless kinds of food products and pay for bandwidth and electricity to run servers, or how much silicon and other precious minerals will have to be dug out of the ground in poor African countries, shipped across the world, dipped in all sorts of appalling chemicals at a chip-making facility, and then shipped off to food producers/distributors to make this asinine scheme work.
As with the corn-based biofuel fad, this feel-good green scheme looks like a shockingly bad idea that accomplishes nothing whatsoever, costs a lot of money, and sticks it to poor people while making affluent yuppie types feel good about saving the planet.
Here’s hoping the UK government has enough sense to flatly reject this absurd plan.
