Rarely does a month go by without another major meat recall. In this case, the meat in question was shipped from Italy to Canada and contained dangerous levels of Lysteria bacteria.  And it was cooked, not raw, meat. We hope that no one gets sick. However, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), which issued the two alerts in respect to this recall, also added a telling note.  It cautioned that the meat was also sliced at retail and that the original batch and date details may not appear at supermarket counters. 

And, therein lies the problem.  Labels are lost in transitions from farm to slaughterhouse to wholesaler to market.  Risks pile up every time a food product is cut, processed and relabeled.  The ability to quickly and effectively track products through an extremely complex chain or producers, processors, shippers, importers, and retailers using purely mechanical means (RFID, bar codes, external labels) is a logistic nightmare and a very costly exercise in futility.   

Molecular tracking becomes hugely compelling as the stakes get higher. That's because molecules that make up our food can't be stripped off by human hands or easily altered by environmental conditions. Even very simple, 10 minute tests looking at the isotope composition in food have the potential to relate food products back to their origin. And the faster the problem can be traced back to origin, the faster that all parties at risk can be notified and the full scope of the problem ascertained and addressed. 

Nature's barcodes - isotope signatures - are already there in the molecules of everything we eat. You can't wash them off. You can't game them. And they don't care whether that a food has been sliced, diced and repackaged eight different ways in nine different countries. Follow the isotopes to get to the source - and make food safer for everyone.