In food news, Professor Shane Ward of the UCD Bioresources Research Centre would like to announce that he and his team have found a way to put barcodes on chickens.
Not live chickens, mind you. The experiment might have been too stressful on the poor creatures and no chickens could be harmed during these tests.
Professor Ward can put a barcode on chicken pieces from a processing plant. He had great success in getting a readable code onto the beaks and legs.
Cattle have huge tags in their ears, rather like a piercing, so that the animals can be traced from farm to abattoir in case there's an outbreak of disease. Easy, then, to go back to the source to discover the cause of the E. coli infestation or the origins of a hoof and mouth epidemic.
As chickens have no ears, it was impossible to tag them, but now the scientists at University College Dublin have solved the vexing problem. With barcodes and scanners, a chicken found to be infected with salmonella can be followed from the processing plant back to the farm. With that information, the health inspectors can narrow the focus of their work and stop disease outbreaks that much sooner.
The people at the research centre will be happy to share their barcode techniques, but they're also hoping that someone who knows something about live chickens will come forward with suggestions about how to get a bird to sit still long enough to be barcoded.
Except for that minor detail, a workable system is ready to go live.
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