Food should be the one thing we don’t second-guess, but it turns out we’ve been doing a lot of blind trusting for years now.
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I’ve always believed that what we eat should be honest, you read the label you buy the product and that’s what you’re putting into your body. Unfortunately food fraud (basically when cheap dangerous stuff are put in the package instead of what the label promised, or like fake rip off versions of quality which is very harmful to the body) is draining billions from the system each year and endangering lives. Trust alone hasn’t held up, and that realization demands something stronger. It’s time we get serious about accountability, and yes I think blockchain is the tool that can actually deliver it.
For starters food fraud is not some rare scam, it's a thing. From cheap oils in “extra virgin” bottles to milk tainted with industrial chemicals. The system is full of cracks that bad actors keep exploiting. One of the worst cases is China’s 2008 milk scandal, which caused hundreds of thousands of babies to fall sick. That wasn’t just an accident, it was a deliberate harmful lie. And what made it possible? Secrecy, broken traceability and no clear record of what happened and where.
That’s where the technology could make a real difference.
What makes it powerful isn’t that it’s “tech” or “new,” it’s that it’s permanent. Once something is recorded, it’s locked, you can’t fudge the numbers later or erase the paper trail. If we had that kind of transparency across food chains, I believe fraud would get harder and riskier for people to pull off.
Companies like Walmart have already cut tracking times from days to seconds by using it for pork and mangoes. So you realize it's working system and not just theory.
But anyways it's still ain't a free fix because setting up such systems is definitely expensive. Sensors will sometimes break, the data links will probably get hacked and not everyone wants to share trade secrets. But then again that’s not a reason to stop, it’s a reason to invest smarter. Start small, build trust with pilot program and train the people involved.
This is how we can build a food system we can believe in, not just one we hope is safe.
