Credibility

Self-Care Cuisine. Not typically three words you hear in sequence but think about them. It is eating with a purpose. An example would be eating garlic as a natural method to maintain a healthy blood pressure. (My father used to eat a raw bulb of garlic each day. That was a difficult time in my life.)

Next, we would want to take steps to ensure that the functional food we ate was really what we believe it to be. The local concept gives us a direct link to the grower who can tell us that he personally knows that bulb of garlic and how it came into being. But there really isn’t a true definition of what local should be. We impute our expectations, values and beliefs onto a system that is mostly unregulated and hope for the best.

If we move to organic, the USDA provides us with a strict set of rules and regulations which are standard across multiple growing regions and even accepted internationally. Product certified USDA Organic has met all of the defined criteria and is consistently handled throughout the supply chain.

The vast majority of fresh produce items fall in the middle of these two extremes. How will we know the story behind the product? Blockchain. This term has crept into the vernacular and most people don’t know what it means. Essentially, it is verifiable data about the origin and whereabouts of a particular lot from farm to factory to fork.

There is still a tremendous gap in our visibility, but technology is giving us a methodology to ensure that the garlic we want to eat is not an imposter.