WSJ 2 The Life Story of Your Supermarket Chicken

The Life Story of Your Supermarket Chicken: Food Tracking Goes High-Tech

Raymie Fruia

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-life-story-of-your-supermarket-chicken-food-tracking-goes-high-tech-11550761202?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

In recent years people have become more conscientious about where they get their food from. We have started considering how the animals we eat are raised and treated before they reach our supermarkets. GoGo chicken is one such new technology being used to track the lives of chickens from farm to table. The technology was designed by an Asian company, ZhongAn Technologies.

ZhongAn's technology comes in the form of an ankle bracelet which each chicken wears. The chickens' health as well as their environment can be monitored this way. This allows everyone who deals with the chicken and those who finally consume the chicken to know exactly where it came from and how it go there. The same technology is being used to track fruits and milk as well.

This new technology will have a huge impact on the quality of products being delivered and consumed worldwide. People used to not think much about where their food came from. This led to a lot of health and sanitation issues as well as shady food preparation and livestock treatment practices. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle pioneered the change in the quality of our food. Now we are taking it one step further by ensuring that we are not only aware of how our food is being prepared but, also, how the animals and plants that we eat are being raised and handled prior to our consumption. 

Many people have become conscientious about how the animals we eat are being treated now days. we feel that it is important for these animals to experience a good life up until heir death. In the past, chickens had been kept in cramped coops, over feed and hopped up on hormones. Now this practice is frowned upon and with this new technology coming into play it will be hard o find anyone practicing such fowl behavior. 

Although this technology seems only to help the efficiency and quality of products being produced, there are those who do not want to see this new tracking method used. Truck drivers feel that having trackers put on the packages they deliver violates their right to privacy. There are also some farmers who reject this idea because it would come at a large cost to their small facilities.

What ever the issues may be, people are moving more and more towards wanting to know exactly what is in their food and where it's coming from. One day we will all be able to know the name of the chicken you are about to eat for dinner, whether we like it or not.