Pushback on Food Safety Part 2

 Pushback on Food Safety Part 2. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

A bit of a clarification on yesterday and today’s subject and that is, no one is against food safety. What the pushback comes from the process to create a safe food supply according to Hank Giclas, Vice President, Strategic Planning, Science & Technology for the Western Growers Association.

GICLAS: Except in a couple of settings people really recognize the need for strong, credible food safety programs and constantly work to improve those programs.

So if everyone believes in these food safety issues, who is pushing back or objecting?

GICLAS: People are fundamentally interested in strong food safety but there are tenants of food safety programs or there are programs that don’t work for people that do get pushbacks. And who is pushing back, well it’s pretty much everybody. As I said there are so many food safety specifications, there’s so many requirements, programs it’s not difficult to ferret out objections to one issue or another.

Giclas presents a situation where pushback occurs.

GICLAS: For example a program might require you to test your water and that brings up questions like how frequently, what do we test for. Do we test for pathogens? Do we test for indicator organisms? What levels are acceptable for any of those? Maybe instead of testing we should just treat water. Well do you treat irrigation water? Do you treat water that comes into contact with harvested product?

We’ll wrap up tomorrow.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.