Food safety has been in the news for all the wrong reasons in recent years: tainted tomatoes, recalled jalapeno peppers, dangerous peanut butter from Georgia and E. coli outbreaks in Europe. Salmonella alone causes more than 1 million illnesses per year.
Elisabeth Hagen and her team of inspectors at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety Inspection Service want to make their corner of the grocery store -- meat, poultry and eggs -- safer.
Hagen, the USDA's under secretary for food safety, traveled to Atlanta recently to meet with officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She talked with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the use of social media, a new advertising campaign and tighter meat-inspection standards.
AJC: How will the new way of inspecting meat, called "test and hold," change things?
Hagen: We passed a policy recently to take what was voluntary and make it mandatory. A lot of the more prudent players in the industry have been doing this for some time. A lot of companies have already been doing this, so this is one place where the industry actually agreed with us.
What we made mandatory was that when we're testing for certain residues that could be pathogens in products the industry wants to release into commerce, they cannot release the products until the test results have come back conclusively either positive or negative. We know the emphasis needs to be progressively upstream in food production. Food needs to be made safely, rather than just relying on testing at the end to make sure it's safe. But we think we would have prevented 41 or 42 "class 1″ recalls over the last couple of years had that policy been in place. Class 1 is when we think it's a serious threat to human health and could even kill people.
AJC: Is your agency looking to educate consumers more, not just watch meat and poultry producers more closely?
Hagen: We are focusing very, very heavily on consumer education. Not to ever suggest that we're taking our focus off the ball, because we're not. But I think we have an enormous obligation to make sure consumers understand this risk, that this is very serious stuff. People actually get sick in large numbers and people die. And children and the elderly, the most vulnerable among us, are disproportionately impacted by food-borne illness. So, that's a huge area of focus for us: telling them what the risk is, telling them if there's something within they're control. We're really excited about this Ad Council campaign that's coming out this summer. We've wanted this type of national exposure, this type of spotlight on the issue, for a very long time. It's going to be about catching people's attention, especially parents of young children.
AJC: The CDC got a lot of buzz recently for its "zombie apocalypse" blog post, which urged people to stock up on water and other supplies in case of pandemics, hurricanes or other disasters. How is your agency using social media?
Hagen: With consumer safety education, we've had those messages out there for years. But we know people are not getting those messages to the degree they need to be. So yes, we've stepped into the modern age. I think we have over 129,000 followers on Twitter at last count. We are Facebooking. We are pushing out messages as much as possible.
When I first came to the agency five years ago, I remember thinking -- especially when I went to the food safety education page -- I realized, "There's so much stuff here." But you have to know this agency regulates this product, and you have to know what you're looking for. A search engine will not necessarily get you there.
AJC: Was that the insight behind the new "Mobile Ask Karen" app for smartphones?
Hagen: People are not necessarily sitting at their desktops when they have a food safety question: "What's the temperature to cook this thing on the grill? Or, I left something overnight: is it still safe? Should I use a wooden cutting board or a plastic cutting board?" Knowing that people are using their smartphones for everything now, we thought it made a lot of sense. You can take (the app) with you now -- she can be with you now, at the barbeque or in the line at the grocery store. It's populated with real questions, questions people have asked. No question is too dumb. We have over 1,500 pre-populated questions. If consumers ask something that's outside our area of expertise, we'll actually get back to consumers and point them to the right agency so they can get the information.
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