The Transparent Banana?

The Transparent Banana?

There was something slightly obscene yet engaging about the title of this post, so I had to re-use it. Chews Wise, written by Samuel Fromartz, the author of “Organic, Inc“, has a very interesting post up about how transparency is beginning to show up in the grocery store:

Dole revealed a shape of things to come in the food market – Transparency! – by allowing customers to see where their bananas come from.

Visit its Dole Organic web site and punch in the number on your banana SKU sticker. (Not the SKU code, which is 94011 for organic bananas but a three-number code that identifies the farm.) The web site shows you where this code is located.

What a great concept. I can picture the row of neatly displayed organic fruit and veggies in my local grocery store, all of the labels allowing the customer to see straight back to the farm that grew that select piece. Wouldn’t take much, just a 3 or 4 digit alpha-numeric code that each organic farm could sign up for. Farms could opt in or out on a voluntary basis.

Many small grocers, Co-ops and even some of the larger chains have posters or chalk boards up telling customers where the batch came from. It would be great to see which family ran the farm, and hear more about their farming practices.