20 Years in Food Safety: A Look Back and Beyond

Continued advances in rapid methods will require ingenious thinking and innovation in microbiology, immunology, electronics, lab-on-a-chip technologies, and perhaps other areas not yet envisioned. The field of food microbiology has developed very well in the past 30 years, and there is no reason to think that it will not continue to progress as new microbiologists and food scientists innovate and build on what has been done in the past.

Steven Gendel, Food Allergen Coordinator, FDA, College Park, Md.

One of the themes of [this year’s Food Safety Summit] meeting, in some cases explicitly stated, in other cases implicit in the things people talked about, was the connectedness of the food system and food safety. Everyone is part of the same system, and everybody’s food safety problem affects everyone else. In the future we are going to recognize this more and more. In coming years the food safety system will become more networked, integrated, and interactive than ever before.

There was a lot of discussion at the meeting around variations of this theme: More interaction is needed, whether among the federal agencies, between the federal agencies and the states, or among international bodies. We use terms like globalization and integration, but it really comes down to the fact that we are all now operating in a networked world. People are increasingly beginning to recognize that food production, food safety, and food sales are all part of a networked system. In the future, all the pieces of this system will need to communicate well with each other in order to make sure everyone knows what is going on so that we can keep the global food supply safe.

Jennifer McEntire, PhD, Senior Director, Food and Import Safety, Leavitt Partners, Washington, D.C.

Over the past 20 years the extent of global food trade has increased dramatically. With that increase, people are handling and consuming different types of foods, and the proper preparation and handling of those foods, as well as the pathogens and other contaminants that could be associated, might not be fully understood.

The industry is in a state of flux with the pending implementation of FSMA. Importers now have to ensure the food they bring into this country is produced safely under applicable regulations. Other countries too are weighing in with their own food safety laws and plans. How these changes will affect the global supply chain remains to be seen.

The use of technology shows great potential for development: How we alert people to a hazard, how we track products, how we monitor temperatures in real time, how we analyze data—in short, how we make decisions rapidly about a product—can be facilitated by technology. New technologies will give us a better grasp over what’s happening with a product to ensure food safety.

There are tremendous opportunities to leverage technology for these purposes. And in fact, developing economies, where the physical infrastructure for food safety (including the communication infrastructure) is still taking shape, may perhaps have greater ability to leverage some of these new technologies than more established economies where the infrastructure is already set.

A recent trend likely to continue in the future is interest in natural, local, and organic products, including raw and unprocessed foods. Industry will be pressured not only to provide these foods, but to provide them safely. Hopefully we’ll see the development of innovative processes to ensure this safety.

Purnendu Vasavada, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Food Science, University of Wisconsin-River Falls, River Falls, Wis.

Twenty years ago, isolating and characterizing Salmonella from ground beef could take seven to eight days. Now, because of the advances in molecular biology and DNA-based methods, we can do this in less than a day. With improvements in instrumentation, reagents, automation, etc., projects that used to take PhD students months or years to do are now done by high school students for their science fair. So we’ve come a long way.