Food safety moves up on Americans' agenda
The problem of food safety has been very much on the minds of Americans this summer; the government and the private sector are doing more to address the problem
Confidence in the American food supply has been at a low ebb of late. A resumed federal focus and frequenting local producers may help reverse the tide.
Miller-McCune’s John Greenya writes that the private sector is helping. For a decade now, the pioneering U.S. business machine company has been working to track the quality and safety of food, the essential component of the human machine. In February, IBM released new software designed to trace food — using bar codes and scanners — in order to monitor the condition, quality, and location of items, thus preventing or mitigating food-contamination outbreaks. IBM touts its ability to use barcodes and radio frequency identification chips to follow food from “farm to fork.”
The company described one model program in Manitoba last year in which it “tracked data about product movement, animal history and characteristics, processing history and transportation data throughout the complete value chain.” That “value chain” included 16 separate businesses, “including beef and pork producers, animal feed ingredient producers, feed manufacturers, farmers, processing plants, truckers and a retail grocery chain.”
Supporting its bid for “smart food,” in early July IBM announced the results of a study in which it had asked 1,000 consumers in the United States’ 10 largest cities if they felt the food they buy is safe to eat.
According to IBM: “[Our] new study reveals that less than 20 percent of consumers trust food companies to develop and sell food products that are safe and healthy for themselves and their families. The study also shows that 60 percent of consumers are concerned about the safety of food they purchase, and 63 percent are knowledgeable about the content of the food they buy.”
With peanut butter as the most-cited example, 87 percent of the respondents could name a food product that had been recalled in the last two years, and said they’d be less likely to buy any product that had been recalled because of contamination.
As one father (not surveyed) said in March, “When I heard peanut products were being contaminated earlier this year, I immediately thought of my 7-year old daughter, Sasha, who has peanut butter sandwiches for lunch probably three times a week.” That father was Barack Obama.
Measuring attitudes in February, after the peanut butter scare, an ongoing weekly survey of American attitudes toward food safety noted the lowest confidence rating in its short history. That food safety plebiscite is conducted
