I am exhausted by the same old food safety data conversation – it’s far past time for a new one.
First off, if you know me, I focus a lot on food safety data. The why behind why we are doing something in food safety has never been secondary to me, it’s always been at the forefront. So, why does this opening today sound like I am giving up? Because I quit.
I am done with having the same old food safety data discussion and imagining that some new approach to it will change the outcome. It won’t. We need to have the willingness and bravery to start the one we all know that we should be having.
Let’s first set the scene appropriately. I am not discouraged because food safety is hard. Nor because risk management is complicated. I am certainly not deflated because collecting meaningful data is expensive or challenging.
I am exhausted because I keep having to have the wrong food safety data argument.
Almost every time I am engaged in a conversation or asked to speak about food safety data generation, existing data, improving surveillance, sharing data, sharing learnings, and/or finding better means of characterizing risk, the conversation inevitably shifts. It stops being about food safety, public health, and science, and starts being about legal exposure, costs, and customer ramifications.
Questions like these dominate the conversation – clearly favoring the negative and/or risky elements to food safety.
- “What happens if we find something?”
- “What happens if we share it?”
- “What happens if someone uses it against us?”
These conversations are about food safety and public health. They involve and originate with food safety scientists that are supposed to be the people responsible for understanding food safety and public health risk. We are the people who identify hazards, characterize them, monitor them, and reduce them. We are not lawyers. Yet somehow, in many discussions, the act of learning more about a system has evolved to first and foremost be treated as a threat, even by the people whose primary role should be to lead with science.
When did we decide that was normal?
Let’s start first with some basic rules around food safety data.
- Pathogen testing (and finding) does not create a hazard.
- An environmental monitoring program does not create contamination.
- A water test does not create unsafe and/or questionable quality water.
- A shared dataset does not create an outbreak.
Collecting, testing, characterizing only helps us see a risk that already existed. The data simply helped us see it. Despite this, we routinely spend more time discussing the potential consequences of generating data and finding risks than the consequences of not understanding it. That should bother everyone. But it should mostly bother us, the food safety industry, since we have been allowing for far too long a different (albeit very real) problem to stop us. Isn’t that the real question we should be asking ourselves? Isn’t that the problem that needs fixing?
The elephant in the room is that our biggest obstacle to food safety data is often not science. It is what happens after the science.
Think about the message and culture we have created. We tell companies they should continuously improve. We tell them they should invest in surveillance, monitoring, verification, and risk characterization. We tell them they should learn more about their systems. Then we create an environment where discovering more about those systems can increase their legal exposure. That is a contradiction, and pretending otherwise has not made it disappear.
That is backwards. Completely backwards.
The goal of food safety has always been to better understand the system so we can improve it. A well-characterized risk is a manageable risk. An unknown risk is not. Every meaningful advance in food safety has come from learning more, measuring more, observing more, and understanding more. The answer to scientific uncertainty has never been less information from science. The answer has always been better information, more informed decision-making, and, quite frankly, putting our money where our mouths are.
When we want to have a conversation about liability, legal standards, regulatory enforcement, discovery, or how food safety data is used in litigation, then let’s have that conversation too. Those are legitimate and relevant topics and we would be naïve to omit discussing them. But let’s stop pretending and conflating that they are food safety science and risk discussions. They are not.
Food safety was never supposed to be an exercise in managing the consequences of knowledge. It was supposed to be an exercise in reducing public health risk. Yet somewhere along the way, we became more comfortable discussing the dangers of finding problems than the dangers of not finding them, and that should alarm all of us. Because if the people charged with understanding risk become afraid to characterize it, measure it, or share what they learn, then the problem is no longer the science.
The problem is the system we have built around it. And there will be limited improvements in food safety if we have designed a system where learning is the thing we fear most.