Food safety: These scientists work to stop bad food at the source

COURTESY PHOTOS

Stephanie Brown was recently talking to a reporter about the complexities of food safety on the telephone when a new recall notice appeared on her computer screen.

It said that spinach from New York was potentially contaminated with listeria monocytogenes, a pathogen that may not affect many people but can prove fatal to people with compromised immune systems.

The recall was issued by the federal Food and Drug Administration, coming as part of the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010.

The information included a date and brand names (in this case, Solata, Gaia Organic, Full Circle Organic, Farmer Direct, Uncle Vinny’s and Bogopa); a description and type of product (spinach and salad mixes); the reason for the recall; the company name (different from the brand name, in this case Solata Foods LLC)); and whether the recall had been terminated (it hadn’t as of July 3).

The recalled spinach and salads mixed with it were part of a list of recalls that included not only food items sold in the United States to humans but also to animals. Every food item recalled in the state or the country is available as public information at this website: www.fda.gov/safety/recalls-market-withdrawals safety-alerts.

Ahmed El, right, is seen giving a presentation about food safety to a group in the Culinary Accelerator in Immokalee.

“This is part of the Food Safety Modernization Act, the heart of it, probably the most important legislation for food safety since the 1930s,” Brown said.

She should know. Soon to be awarded a doctorate degree after completing all her graduate course work, writing a dissertation on the aforementioned pathogen, and passing her oral exams, she is the new state specialized agent for food science based in Immokalee, where the University of Florida has its Southwest Florida Research and Education Center, part of the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) extension.

In other words, she is a highly educated extension agent and food safety expert located at a major hub of Florida’s agricultural industry — some 90 percent of America’s winter tomatoes are grown and harvested in Florida, most in the fields around Immokalee, to name just one example.

Stephanie Brown at work in a lab at the University of Florida’s Southwest Florida Research and Education Center in Immokalee.

In classes and consultations with food producers and sellers, she can save a lot of people a lot of trouble or teach them how to save themselves from a lot of trouble.

“These germs have been making people sick for millennia, but we haven’t known about how they work for that long — the early case reporting is from the 1970s or ‘80s,” she explained. “We’re pretty young. We’re still learning. We’re making sure our food is not adulterated, and we’re also saying, ‘Oh, it’s the e coli, or the salmonella,’ whatever. We didn’t start making those connections until more recently.”

The connections save lives and health. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and reported by the FDA, about one out of six people, or roughly 48 million, are sickened by food every year in the United States.

About 148,000 of them end up in the hospital, and 3,000 die.

Those numbers are in decline, and sometimes the recalls are dramatic — there is, after all, an almost unimaginable quantity of food harvested, packaged, shipped and then put up in every grocery store and food market in a nation of 342 million hungry souls, including almost 23 million eaters in Florida.

“In one case,” Brown remembered, “there was a recall for golf ball pieces in hash browns. The potatoes where they were harvesting were next to a golf course, and the golf balls went through the processors.”

Her passion for the science and safety of food started early in her hometown of Douglas, Georgia, population 11,000, where her father worked in the poultry industry as a breeder-manager, always encouraging her to consider food science, advice which she ignored for some time, she recalls.

But she loved a televised food show called “Good Eats,” in which she could “understand the foundations of cooking, how to develop flavor, how to get food to the table. They were interested not just in food, but in the science of it.”

After high school, she earned an undergraduate degree in plant sciences and a master’s in food science from the University of Georgia, followed by her Ph.D. in animal sciences with an emphasis on food safety and microbiology from the University of Connecticut.

The foods most commonly problematic, she says, include “deli meat, anything we bucket into ready-to-eat foods and soft cheeses. While they don’t cause some of those big hospitalization numbers, the pathogens that affect them can cause side effects that put a lot of attention on the food.”

One of Brown’s colleagues in Immokalee is Ahmen El, a former chef and now, since 2018, manager of Collier County’s culinary accelerator.

He describes it as “a shared commercial kitchen (there are four kitchens on site), where entrepreneurs come to get business licenses, and everything a typical food business would need to operate in their own building. But we have a big place they lease to reduce their start-up costs, so it’s more affordable than going out on your own, at first. You can utilize our facility, which already has a food-qualified kitchen.

“You want to make barbecue sauce, for example, but you lack the capital and the place? Here we get you safety training, licenses, you open your food business in our kitchen while you test the market and you just pay a lease.”

Echoing the comments of his new colleague, El explains that the federal regulations “all come back to food safety.”

And that’s more complicated than it may seem at first glance.

“If you recall an item that’s retail, you only worry about the producer and consumer,” he explained.

“But if it’s wholesale, you have to worry about the transportation, how wholesalers hold it and when and where, then who they sold it to — so it’s much more complicated than retail or wholesale direct.”

A lot of people, he said, began to think about their food supply chains more closely during Covid.

“They started paying attention. They realized how important local food systems are. Getting food from all over the country or the world is great, but you have to have balance — you can’t neglect local and regional farm economies.”

Eggs are a good example. When they became scarce in the national supply chains, “people began looking for places locally that had chickens, and eggs got expensive.”

So expensive, some people started comparing their cost to the price of gold — less of an exaggeration than anybody hoped.

In Brown’s estimation, all of that suggests “we have a great system, and when we have a problem, when we have an outbreak, a big spot can shine the light on it.”

That’s step one. Step two is harder, perhaps.

“We need to stop working on problems from a reactive point of view and start stopping them in the first place,” Brown said. “We have to prevent issues from occurring.” ¦

The post Food safety: These scientists work to stop bad food at the source first appeared on Bonita Springs Florida Weekly .