VOA常速英语:区块链技术追踪食物来源

In a fantasy world, a celebrity chef like Aaron Sanchez would prepare all of your meals, and use only sustainably sourced organic produce.

Reality is everyone has to shop for and prepare our own food at some point.

How can you be sure that you’re getting the best ingredients?

That those organic vegetables are in fact organic.

IBM thinks the solution lies in blockchain technology.

IBM is connecting the worlds food supply from farmer to producer, supplier to manufacturer.

And so were connecting it in a secure, shared platform which is blockchain.

A blockchain is a decentralized digital ledger,

where transactions are recorded, verified and become permanent and immutable.

With IBM Food Trust, a record of foods journey through the supply chain is created at each step.

How exactly does it work?

So blockchain uses cryptography and we use hashing.

And what that means is the information is connected to each other,

and if you try to change the information, it changes the hashing,so that you know it has been compromised.

And the technology can be used for any number of foods, fresh or packaged.

So our consumer can scan a package of scallops,and understand that its coming from a place that sustainably source,and it is fresh and the best-tasting scallops.

For chefs like Sanchez, blockchain technology helps engender trust around the food distribution and handling process.

Before I mean the farmer would send it to a middle person, a distributor, and the distributor would send it to us,

so it was one entity removed from the actual farmer.

A foods traceability becomes especially pertinent in the wake of foodborne outbreaks.

You know, instead of decimating the whole farm because there was one outbreak, now we can isolate to that one little parcel.

With blockchain, farm-to-table takes on a new meaning.