My friend and colleague and I are hosting a webinar next week, the title of which includes the words “holistic” and “food safety.” When I first saw the title, I actually had to look up the word “holistic.” I had always associated this word with my yoga friends and our version of self-care. When it came to food, I had always associated this word with organic feel-good foods that people talk about in my yoga/health classes. According to the dictionary, holistic means “characterized by comprehension of the parts of something as intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole.” So, I guess I was not too far off with my definitions.

With all that said, I had never used it as a term to approach food safety and when I saw it in the title, I wasn’t sure how to react. I did what I normally do and pondered it for a bit and things just started coming together for me. In medicine (if you have a good, comprehensive doctor), we take a holistic approach to treating the person. In other words, we take into account a whole person, including mental and social factors, rather than just the symptoms of a disease. So, I started thinking about this in regards to our industry. I kind of like this approach when we talk about poultry food safety. Expand this concept to about a 10,000-ft. view, and we have something that looks like controlling food safety across the entire spectrum — breeders, hatchery, grow-out, processing, further processing, shipping and consumers.

We have focused so much on antimicrobial use in processing/final product that sometimes we forget that we are working in an integrated system. Do I think we are currently excluding the entire integrated system in controlling food safety issues? Absolutely not. But is it an integrated approach? No, and this is where I think the holistic approach comes into play. Just like in medicine, we have to look at the entire system (person) when treating a problem. If we have Salmonella in the breeders, then chances are we are going to follow a Salmonella trail through to processing. We currently have controls for breeders, hatcheries, grow-out and processing. However, are you looking at this pathogen control as an entire integrated system?

I think this is where the holistic approach really takes effect. Data analytics and control measures working together to understand the breeder to final product approach. Also, if you remember from above, I listed consumers.Consumers are part of the food chain and even though we as integrators don’t have control over what food safety practices they encompass, they are part of the system and cannot be excluded. What educational programs are you using to educate consumers on food safety practices? We can never have enough of these in our industry. Local or national, supporting these programs just makes our food safety control lives a bit easier.

I learned something from this pondering over the word "holistic." It is really easy to get into the weeds when it comes to food safety control. Step back and think big picture, think entire spectrum. Think holistic approaches to food safety.

Holistic approach to food safety

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