What would you like with your turkey or Romaine lettuce? Some gravy? Some dressing? How about some blockchain?
Not a block of cheese. Not a sausage chain. But blockchain. The technology and approach that allow you share a database, which is duplicated across a network of many, many, many computers and other devices. This is different from a traditional database that is situated in one central location, owned by one person or organization, and thus more readily hacked or corrupted. Instead, everyone across the network can contribute information to this database without losing ownership of this information and at the same time benefit from all of the information in the database.
So, what then would blockchain have to do with your Holiday turkey and salad? Initiatives such as the IBM Food Trust are trying to use blockchain to help improve food safety, which has been a particularly prominent problem this year. If you haven't heard, there is a continuing Salmonella outbreak linked to turkey and an ongoing Escherichia coli O157:H7 outbreak associated with Romaine lettuce. Since public health officials were not initially able to determine the specific sources of the contamination, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began by warning you to be careful with all raw turkey products and avoid all Romaine lettuce. Public health officials have now scaled back their Romaine lettuce warnings and are now focusing on Romaine lettuce from California. These 2 outbreaks are part of the worst year for reported multi-state food-borne infectious disease outbreaks in recent memory, according to the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) lists.
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