‘Tis the season to think reflectively and plan for the new year. As I prepared myself to think about ushering in a new year and set of goals, projects and ambitions, I came upon an interesting pattern in what I think and talk about. If I am honest, I have been watching this gradual evolution for many years now. I have noticed a shift in how I speak and in how I answer questions about pathogenic food microbiology, produce food safety and risk assessment.
Perhaps surprisingly, even to myself, is that increasingly my answer about what I do for work (or, let’s face it, food safety is really more of a lifestyle) hasn’t been highlighting the studying of the pathogens themselves, the technology to detect them or the findings in root cause assessment. Instead, I generally end up focused on how we (aka, humans) interact with, interpret and act on those learnings. This evolution didn’t happen overnight. I very much remember my first day of work post-graduate school and approaching food safety like a research project – I seem to recall a conference room full of people at a produce company excitedly objecting when I said I would just go swab something looking for pathogens. I learned in that moment something that I would continue to learn year over year in the industry – scientific improvement and research in applied and commercial settings is really hard. It is not as simple as an experiment in a lab or a description in a research paper.
I noticed it shifting in earnest about a decade ago. During that time, I realized that these single-celled organisms, and their remarkable ability to humble us in so many capacities, were slowly changing my perspective on human behavior, culture and capacity. In short, by studying and thinking about bacterial risks, the challenge they posed was teaching me how to be a better human – more introspective, more thoughtful and more collaborative.
As these reflections unfolded, it became apparent that the gaps in understanding of pathogens and the food production system risks are not solely a function of scientific limitation. They are equally rooted in our human capacity to rationalize risk, our discomfort with being humbled by these brainless organisms we assume we should be able to control, the challenge of balancing food production with risk reduction, and our human need to generally be ‘right’ and ‘in control’.
None of this is particularly a novel concept. Food safety culture, business culture and societal culture are known concepts. Yet, when I think about the persistent challenges we face on continuous improvement and food safety risk reduction, I keep circling back to us as the critical and often limiting factor. As a collective food safety community, we are adept at creating working groups, new coalitions and committees to tackle the challenge of food safety risk in the system. Too often though, the outcomes of these groups are lackluster, falling short of the demonstrable improvement we seek.
Reflecting on this, I keep focusing on what my bacterial teachers have shown me. We seem to be missing the human project. We haven’t sufficiently designed systems that create space for true collaboration, permission to adopt new practices and policies, and, perhaps most importantly, the allowance to admit we need to change together.
The past few years working on Western Growers’ GreenLink® data sharing programs, and with a very collaborative set of growers willing to provide access to food safety data (product testing, water testing, operational information), have highlighted what a project grounded in social science can offer. Does this mean the hard science hasn’t delivered? Quite the opposite. Science has delivered more than I could have hoped.
What our data-sharing efforts have shown me is that the “science” or “data” itself (often the primary reason around a project) can be secondary to the value a program truly offers. As I reflect on this close of the year, the most important lesson learned from these data projects (in my opinion) has been the intentional creation of a collective space – one that offers productive collaboration, trust building, genuine teamwork and thoughtful debate. Without these conditions, our ability to ‘do’ anything with the ‘hard’ scientific learnings we have found would be left unrealized.
The experiment in how we truly improve food safety does not belong to any single laboratory, dataset or technological solution.
It starts with us.