If you’ve been paying attention to the news lately (and even if you don’t pay that much attention at all), you’ve probably noticed that there sure seem to be a lot of stories about food recalls and alerts in the United States.
I’ve certainly noticed. Every day that I visit a major news website, there seems to be some food-recall related story. When I first noticed it, I thought to myself “okay, it sure seems like these stories are popping up all the time … but are they, really?” In other words, was I imagining this? Was it all the work of some inscrutable algorithm in a data cloud somewhere putting these stories into my newsfeed and on homepages of popular sites like Yahoo! or MSN or CNN? Or was there some hard evidence behind this “seeming” phenomenon?
As it turns out, it’s probably not my imagination.
After some digging around, I discovered a few things. First, yes, there are more stories about food recalls because there actually are more events to report upon and inform the public about. This includes so-called Class 1 recalls, which are the most serious from a health perspective, to recalls about possible contaminants in food or undeclared ingredients for people with allergies.
So, does this mean that our food is less safe than before? Not necessarily. The fact is that technology accounts for much of what we’re seeing. One of the most important reasons why scientists are able to know about potential issues with food processing, packaging, and distribution is thanks to new gene sequencing techniques. These new techniques improve the ability to match outbreaks of foodborne illness and thereby trace them back to a common source. It helps do that by making the determination that they are caused by the same pathogen or strain of a single pathogen.
Likewise, improved traceability methods mean better tracking ability. And there’s an interesting twist here. For instance, one could argue that there may be a greater probability of food contamination and issues because of more complex food supply chains, with a contributing cause being the increase in automation technologies in food production itself. The fact is that, yes, food production is more complex than ever, but that complexity and the technology underlying it is also the source of being able to trace outbreaks much faster than ever before.
The broader point is that technology has aided in making these systems better. There’s a parallel here with weather forecasting. Long ago, before the ubiquity of computers and computing, forecasting weather resembled a roll of the dice — a lot of uncertainty, poor models, limited instruments and tools. But then, with ever more computing power and better models, not to mention more powerful radar, forecasts became more accurate. So much so that meteorologists have been able to predict the beginning of snowfall events days ahead of the actual event, and sometimes within minutes of when the snow will actually begin, a feat that was deemed impossible in those earlier days.
In the midst of seeing so many of these troubling stories, it’s reassuring to know that science — and the tools that engineering builds to put that science to use — has continually made life better in many different ways, from food safety to weather forecasting and beyond.
Filed Under: Commentaries • insights • Technical thinking, NEWS • PROFILES • EDITORIALS, Trends
