Originally published at: This "Blockchain Certified" spaghetti is as dumb as you might think | Boing Boing
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Seems fake. Can’t find spaghetti like this anywhere
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Me either, just a bunch of Kraft Macaroni and NFT junk… 
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The product in question appears to be this: Solitaly Squid Ink Spaghetti | World Market
The product shot on the site doesn’t show a QR code, but the rest of the packaging matches the tweets.
Edit:
Here is a marketing/PR page that shows the same packaging with the QR code. Italian pasta to conquer the US market through the ITEMx® Certification Tool – GenuineWay
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Unfortunately not fake:
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This is the thing I don’t understand:
Why on earth is this a blockchain, other than for Maximum Buzword Compliance?
I mean, tracability in the food chain is a really good thing, and we’re starting to get there. It would be nice to be able to see who grew the wheat, where it was milled into flour, how long it was in storage before it was made into pasta, where that happened at, how long it was on a ship to the USA, where it was stored, who boiled it and added sauce and froze it and shipped it to your store then sold it to you (along with similar histories of all the other ingredients)… this would be useful for food safety and recalls and stuff like that.
But - and here’s the big but- why on earth would a blockchain be better for this than just using some kind of tracking database?
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Oh my gods, I am getting so tired of this blockchain horseshit. Someone comes up with a (theoretically) good use for the thing, then they completely and utterly fall down in actually trying to implement it (presumably because the blockchain is not actually fit for purpose), and what they’re left with is worse than nothing, as it’s functionally useless and uses resources it otherwise wouldn’t.
Based on the results, I have to assume there simply isn’t any other reason.
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I have always been concerned that the environmental impact of my imported pasta wasn’t high enough already.
Now I can finally verify that my pasta is pasta and burn some extra carbon in the process. 
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Because the blockchain “can’t” be hacked. Just like someone couldn’t possibly remove the pasta from the package and replace it with the QR code intact. So much uselesness.
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The only real gain is that new entries (might be) signed to prove records have not changed and hold references to their prior records. For example the milled wheat was sent to 4 different pasta factories, each factory would have an entry that included a reference to the millers record when the factory received the flour, and that record could be referenced when they shipped the pasta.
That said the above could also just be described by signed git commits. (insert digression here about how git is blockchain, but a tree (technically a DAG), minus all the dumb bullshit.) Blockchain is unneeded when there are older, more flexible and better supported tools that could do the same job.
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Surely it is likely that this is nothing more than a very boring tracking database that some marketoon has gussied up with the latest buzzwords in an attempt to sell more pasta?
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It’s not. This has nothing to do with the merits or demerits of blockchain. It’s just another of the endless examples of marketers identifying the New Big Thing and stapling their product, no matter how irrelevant, to its coat-tails. This has been going on as long as advertising. Anyone remember the Chlorophyll craze and Chlorophyll Panties?
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The biggest joke of all? What’s to stop anyone from printing this QR code on a box of counterfeit pasta?
That’s really the core joke of NFT’s in general.
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The only thing a blockchain provides is protection against double spending. That is literally the only thing separating blockchains from cryptographic signatures. So I think in the right circumstances you could use something like it to show that if a given producer makes 10 tons of certified sustainable pasta (or whatever) and sells them to a distributor, that distributor can’t publicly sell 20 tons of certified pasta to supermarkets. As long as you trust the original producer or certification agent that made the original token, this would eliminate some ways for a distributor to cheat.
The problem, and the ultimate problem that almost every application of blockchains come up against is that while a blockchain can be checked to be self consistent there is never any guarantee it is consistent with the real world. If you care about the real world that is a problem. In this example you still can’t guarantee that the pasta you receive is the certified pasta, just that nobody else was also sold the same certified pasta. It could have been lost or stolen in shipping, gone bad and thrown away or been eaten by pests. The distributor could have sold it to someone who would take it without certification on the block chain. You the “honest” customer could be getting your nice shiny validated pasta NFT stamped on an empty box.
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Somehow I doubt that they’re using ISO-9001 or military procurement component tracking.
Odds are they tossed their catalog on a blockchain and called it a day.
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maybe just sprinkle some dna on it
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this must be new, as a couple of packages of this that we bought about a month ago, do not have this.
(GirlChild thinks black spaghetti is very Metal)
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