Why Food Will Continue to Get Safer

From E. coli to salmonella, the headline-grabbing pathogens that can contaminate our food supply are meeting their match, thanks to an array of technology advancements that will impact both food producers and consumers, say food safety research and policy leaders.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is planning to release its long-awaited research on the global burden of foodborne diseases in 2015, but ongoing data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) already paint a stark picture: One out of every 6 people in the United States suffers from a foodborne illness every year, and within that group 128,000 people are hospitalized, and 3,000 die. Reducing those numbers is the goal of an army of food safety researchers and thought leaders investigating everything from DNA "fingerprinting" techniques to packaging indicators that tell consumers whether the product inside is safe to consume, according to the latest series of interviews from the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) FutureFood 2050 publishing initiative. FutureFood 2050 explores how increasingly sophisticated science and technology will help feed the world's projected 9 billion-plus people in 2050.

"Regulatory agencies and food companies have much better resolution and ability today to track specific strains of organisms than they did a decade ago," says Robert Brackett, director of the Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute for Food Safety and Health. "Whole-genome sequencing [for example] is helping regulatory agencies identify discrete problems much more precisely. Beyond simply showing that there's salmonella in a food sample, we can show that it came from a certain factory in a specific place," he adds.

More information:
futurefood2050.com/

Provided by Institute of Food Technologists