 Hi, I'm Aaron. I'm an editor here at Food Unfolded. Today, we're looking at a tricky problem. How can we make our food system more transparent? Many of us are becoming more and more conscious about the impact our food has on the environment, on the farmers that produce it, and on our own health, and are trying to make more sustainable choices about what we eat. But in order to make those informed decisions, we need traceability, or the ability to find out where and how our food was made. Modern food supply chains are global and hugely complex. Having so many people involved in producing our food creates two main issues. First, suppliers often struggle to collect detailed data about the origin of our food and the journey it makes to reach us, leaving us without the information that we need to make an informed decision about what to buy. Second, a complex system makes it easier for bad actors in the supply chain to lie about the origins and contents of food products, which is known as food fraud. Today, the sale of illegally altered, repackaged, mislabeled, or stolen foods is a multi-billion dollar problem. Some products labelled as organic have simply added the label to boost sales, and are not actually produced in line with organic standards. Merchants in ancient Rome diluted olive oil with cheaper alternatives to boost their profits, and unscrupulous producers in modern-day Italy are doing the same thing. And a major case of food fraud hit the headlines in 2013, when it was discovered that horse meat was being sold as beef on a huge scale right across the UK. In most cases, suppliers and brands are not intentionally withholding information or lying to their customers, but simply don't know what happens within their own complex supply chains. Better traceability in our food system would help us minimize the risk of mistakes and that of food fraud, helping producers and suppliers to protect their reputations and giving us all more confidence in the food that we buy. But how can we bring more transparency to our food system and improve the traceability of our food? Some people believe technology is like blockchain in the answer. Blockchain is a special kind of database that everyone has access to, and once you add information to it, that information is locked in. It can never be removed or altered. In theory, applying blockchain technology to our food system could allow us to trace the journey of our food from farm to fork with complete confidence. Unfortunately though, blockchain doesn't work as well for regulating physical products like food as it does for digital ones. First, blockchain can't verify that the information provided by producers, like claiming those oranges are organic, is actually true. Such a system would also still ultimately rely on attaching some kind of label to our food, so they can be tracked as it moves through the supply chain. Those physical labels would still be vulnerable to being misplaced or swapped, either intentionally or by accident, providing further opportunities for mistakes or malpractice to creep in. And while building trust in our food system is important, there are other barriers to better traceability too. A key benefit of better traceability is to help us all reduce the environmental and social impact of our diets. But first, we need to work out which factors we should track, such as water and land use, greenhouse gas emissions, animal welfare, or the impacts on local communities, how producers could go about tracking all those factors, and then how to present that information on food packaging in a way that is easy for us to understand. That is a huge challenge and not one that blockchain can really help us solve. Improving the traceability of our food would undoubtedly bring benefits for everyone. But rather than seeing one specific technology like blockchain as a cure rule, we instead need to focus on understanding the wide range of issues that underpin poor traceability today. It's quite possible, even likely, that the transparent and traceable food chains of the future will be built on relatively simple systems and strong monitoring infrastructure rather than on cutting-edge technology. But one thing's for certain, making these changes will require collaboration between everyone in the food system that wants to see things change, including all of us.