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by chipotle_coyote
2763 days ago
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You seem to be suggesting that a distributed ledger would have made it possible for regulators or buyers to track the specific source of the contamination and pull it out of the food system. DLTs are starting to be used for that level of tracking for diamonds, but key to that system is the ability to establish a "fingerprint" for each diamond that involves a laser-inscribed serial number on each diamond. So to apply that, wouldn't we have to somehow register each individual head of lettuce with a tamperproof fingerprint? Just registering the bags the lettuce came in isn't good enough; the "farm" selling you their romaine might actually be selling you romaine from somewhere else that they've repackaged. (If that wasn't the case, we wouldn't be having this lettuce problem to start with.) And this is setting aside the possibility that lettuce might be leaved/shredded before packing and shipping, because now we have to put that tamperproof fingerprint on each and every leaf. Oh, also there's the thing about all the leaves actually being in contact with one another as they're shipped, so by the time the consumer actually eats the leaf and gets sick, the best you could possibly do is say "we think it's from one of these packagers." Maybe you're envisioning some other way entirely for Distributed Lettuce Technology* to solve this problem, I dunno. But I have trouble seeing it. *I'm sorry, but cut me some slack, the joke is RIGHT THERE |
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Think about it from a game theory perspective. Under the status quo, each party in the supply chain maximizes their profit by lying about where their supplies came from. Whereas with DLT, each party maximizes their profit by being honest about where their supplies came from.
As an example, let's say you hijack you a truck and swap out expensive lettuce for cheap lettuce in a way that circumvents whatever tamper proofing technology has been applied. Stuff like this happens all the time currently, and is wildly profitable. (That's why if you go to a sushi restaurant and get a bunch of assorted sushi pieces or rolls, there is roughly a 0% chance that your meal will actually consist of what you ordered.)
With DLT though this is no longer profitable, because if you sell the cheap lettuce as expensive lettuce then you now have to sell the expensive lettuce as cheap lettuce, because each head or crate or whatever still needs to be traceable back to the source. This means that your total profit from the transaction is just whatever you would have made without cheating, plus your costs of hijacking the truck. So all in all, a substantial net loss.