In recent days, food quality and its monitoring have been in the news with the recall by Ireland of all its pork products. This emerged after organic pollutants known as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were detected in pork fat during routine monitorng. PCBs are dioxins that emanate from fires and other forms of combustion. A small number of dioxins can cause skin disease or cancer and can damage immune andreproductive systems. The essential cause of the problem in Ireland is that machine oil accidentally contaminated pig feed in a food recycling plant. This feed was then given to pigs in just 19 farms in the island of Ireland but because pork is used in diverse products including processed foods it is perceived as difficult to trace. The economic effects are potentially catastrophic. 1400 jobs have been lost so far in Irish pork processing industries and this could rise to 6000. And of course the damage to the image of Irish food is immense.

One could argue that the deployment of smart sensors could help avoid such disasters for the food industry. This of course is not the first problem with food quality and issues have occurred in virtually every continent. The key point is that WSNs can play a role in the detection of contaminants in a timely fashion. The recent incident in Ireland took 3 months to come to light. Regulation driving the deployment of sensors to detect contaminants in food producing environments would deliver information to food safety authorities on a timely basis. WSNs can be deployed throughout the supply chain. RFID or indeed RFID sensors could be used to tag and trace pork from the farm to the supermarket shelves thus removing the need for blanket recalls and the untold damage this does to the reputation of the food industry in a country.

We have already examined the issue of food quality and the role WSNs can play in assisting the maintenance of same in a whitepaper on our site. We will be publishing an updated version of this paper in the coming year.