Enabling consumers to analyze their food's DNA

EPFL's Digital Epidemiology Lab held its first food DNA sequencing workshop last Saturday, in association with SwissDeCode and Hackuarium. The workshop - made possible thanks to the support of the Kristian Gerhard Jebsen Foundation - marks an important step forward for the Open Food Repo DNA citizen-science initiative. Getting food from the farm to our plate involves complicated supply chains. Agricultural products are frequently processed in several stages and shipped through one or more countries. No surprise, then, that today's consumers are looking more closely at what's really in their food - especially given the numerous scandals that have come to light, such as the one in 2013 where food producers were caught substituting horse meat for beef. To address this problem, scientists at EPFL's Digital Epidemiology Lab launched the Open Food Repo DNA initiative to develop a system that would enable consumers to sequence the DNA in processed foods and identify every single ingredient. The initiative will entail adding DNA data to the Open Food Repo , an open-source repository of nutritional information on 45,000 bar-coded food products in Switzerland.