I’ve been at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which has focused this week on next steps for healthy living, including better food choices.

In one interesting session Thursday [video], a pair of (current and former) secretaries of agriculture, Tom Vilsack and Dan Glickman, discussed food policy and politics, focusing in part on some under-appreciated aspects of the latest farm bill, including provisions boosting the value of food stamps at farmers’ markets.

Secretary Vilsack also talked about ways to defuse the relentless fight over labeling genetically engineered foods. Afterward, I asked him to elaborate on a point he made onstage about the value of smart phones and scannable label codes in potentially resolving the intense fight over labeling of foods containing ingredients from genetically engineered crops:

Here’s his main point:

The way to go, long-term, is to embrace a 21st-century answer to this problem… — an extended bar code or some mechanism [through which] consumers who are interested in all the information about a product could obtain it fairly easily, either through their smartphone or through a scanner that would be available in grocery stores. The F.D.A. and U.S.D.A. could help coordinate the compilation of information. That way you wouldn’t create a misimpression about the safety of a product, which could happen depend on how something was labeled.

I sent the clip to several people focused on clarifying food benefits and risks.

Nathanael Johnson, whose Grist series “Panic-Free GMOs” was an outstanding overview the science on genetics, farming and food, sent this reaction:

I’ve heard he was talking about this. It seems like a great idea to me. You could put a lot of info in there, not just privilege the GMO status. One problem with GMO labeling is that this could turn people into single-issue buyers. Okay, it’s GMO free, but does that matter more than the fact that the workers who made it were exploited, or that the farm is losing tons of topsoil a year? And Vilsack’s solution really solves that problem, because all sorts of data points could be embedded in a barcode. I wrote about this idea over a decade ago. Maybe its time has finally come.

David Ropeik, the risk communication consultant who recently pressed big food companies to embrace GMO labeling, wrote that he likes the idea, but doubts a bar code approach will satisfy critics of bio-engineered crops:

Secretary Vilsack’s idea, which is also being explored by some companies in the food industry dissatisfied with the political status quo, seems to provide just what supporters of labeling are asking for, consumer choice. But it probably won’t satisfy what many labeling advocates actually want, though some deny it, which is to scare people away from buying products with GM ingredients and thereby attack the entire technology itself. Certainly this idea puts the labeling advocates on the defensive, making it harder for them to say they are only for consumer choice and still fight this approach. That’s why some GMO opponents have previously stated they oppose this approach as inadequate information to consumers – saying this is not “real choice,” saying “Not everybody has a cell phone when they shop,” saying “Consumers shouldn’t have to look things up themselves.” This approach forces them to be more direct, more open and honest, about the values-based reasons they oppose GM food; that it fuels commercial scale agriculture, that it produces profits for big rich companies that are harming “nature,” etc. But those arguments appeal to a narrower group of folks. Witness what happened when Ben and Jerry’s recently went non-GMO, expressly as a statement of values against commercial agriculture (as represented by everyone’s favorite target, Monsanto), and lots of their customers complained that they just want their Heath Bar Crunch back. [I added the links for context.] That the Agriculture Secretary himself is acknowledging here that the political status quo is unsatisfactory may be the most telling part of all this. The Grocery Manufacturers Association proposal for a very weak federal system is going nowhere. This is a message from Vilsack that industry needs to come up with Plan B, and therefore hope for progress.

Like Vilsack, Johnson and Ropeik, I’m a big fan of transparency but also of science — so I like the idea of finding ways to use new information pathways to reveal layers of information about products while limiting the chance of distortion (whether by industry or activists of any stripe).

I agree with Ropeik that foes of big agriculture will reject this approach to labeling, but I see it moving forward regardless.

This is just one of many ways in which code-scanning technology will open up new levels of understanding about products.

My younger son, for example, really likes Looza mango nectar (it’s great mixed with seltzer).

I recently poked around online, passingly curious where the juice comes from. The answer? Belgium! I guarantee the mangos aren’t grown there. Where does the pulp come from? Are there good labor standards, sustainable farming practices? Soon we’ll know all of this at the speed of electrons.

Web portals and phone apps like Fooducate are just scratching the surface of what’s possible.

Bring it on.

If you’ve followed my output of late, you know of my eight-point program to a “good” human path in a turbulent era — bend, stretch, reach, teach, reveal, reflect, rejoice, repeat.

This post falls in the reveal category, in which I focus in part on the trend toward ever more transparency — some voluntary, some imposed.