Ever catch yourself pondering the intimate details of your food’s life back before it was on your plate? Things like: where did it grow up, or what did it do for fun?
Well, turns out people in China do.
And, thanks to a facial recognition technology being developed by Chinese insurance tech company, ZhongAn Online, Chinese residents will soon be able to track organically farmed chickens they’ve pre-purchased.
The program, coined “GoGo Chicken,” will attach devices that track aspects of the bird’s daily routine: things like their movement, and what kind of food they’re eating.
Currently, only 100k chickens have been tagged, but the company plans to attach 23m birds with the GPS anklet over the next three years, allowing the facial recognition tech to enable voyeurs to spy on their purchased chicken from their smartphones.
Food paranoia has increased rapidly in China after a 2014 scandal where a food processing factory was caught on video mishandling and shipping rotted meat to the likes of McDonald’s and KFC.
This outrage sparked a new “farm-based tourism” trend in China where city-slickers take weekend forages out to farms to interact with their dinner before it’s turned into food.
GoGo Chicken is a way to capitalize on this eco-conscious trend and give the weary peace of mind as they stalk their prey months before taking a bite.