InformationWeek's Mary Hayes Weier looks at the potential of RFID to save people from the dangers of E. coli-tainted spinach and similar food-related concerns.

Spinach bags and similar food containers, Weier says, could carry RFID tags instead of bar codes -- in which case they could hold much more information regarding the product's origins and history. But there's a challenge. "Silicon RFID chips still cost too much," she writes. "To use them for item-level tagging, they would have to cost less than 1 cent, and considering the required components -- an antenna and a microchip -- that may never happen."

Take away the silicon, though, and RFID tags could be made cheap enough to be viable. "PolyIC, half-owned by Siemens, is working on RFID tags made by printing electrically conducting and semiconducting polymers on polymer film," Weier writes. "PolyIC recently announced that it has developed a printing process that lets it produce miles of the plastic tags, and it plans to produce 13.56-MHz high-frequency RFID tags this year."

Other companies doing similar work are OrganicID and Somark Innovations.

"Concerns are rising over food tainted in the supply chain because of sloppy processing practices, and the Department of Homeland Security considers bioterrorism to be among the biggest threats facing the country," Weier writes. "Still, the food industry continues to rely on a bar-coding system that, because of limitations in readability and data storage, provides very little information on where food came from."