In my column last month (“USDA policies drag down processors who ‘test and find’, The National Provisioner, March 2012), I discussed how current FSIS policy (which invariably reacts critically to any positive testing results) discourages companies from aggressively testing to find pathogens in their products.
Microbiological sampling can be an effective tool to help companies verify that their interventions are working. But how much testing is really expedient given the current food-safety climate?
In today’s world, safety seems to be something most people leave on the back burner. Although our world is an inherently dangerous place, the fact remains that, during the course of an average day, most people still never really worry about their own personal safety.
In matters of food safety, it is most often what you cannot see that poses the greatest threat to the safety of food. Indeed, invisible pathogenic organisms are the greatest threat to the food-industry’s collective well-being.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of maintaining a system which maximizes effective and accurate food traceability. Certainly, failure can and has resulted in financial disaster and bankruptcy for even the largest of companies.
The development of new food-safety technology seems, in many instances, to be outpacing the rate at which NASA developed the technology to send humans to the Moon. The recent and substantial increase in public and political interest in food safety has translated directly into a flurry of new research and initiatives directed at helping make our food as safe as possible.
When we use the term “process control” in food manufacturing, we evoke the idea of sophisticated manufacturing control systems and elaborate statistical graphs of microbiological or other analytical data. This is certainly the mainstream method of operations when detail is critical to the food-safety systems, such as temperature or pH control.
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