After my term as Undersecretary for Food Safety at the USDA, former executive editor Janie Gabbett asked me to be one of the first bloggers for Meatingplace, an opportunity that I jumped at and enjoyed for 10 full years. I especially enjoyed the give and take, the back and forth, between the readers and the bloggers. But after 10 years, I was running out of ideas that could generate those discussions.

So I retired. Sort of. I spent a lot of time traveling and speaking for the animal ag industry, promoting pharmaceuticals that increase animal growth and increase milk production. Another favorite topic that got me lots of speaking engagements was the use of antibiotics in animal health and what, if any, effect that has on human health.

Then COVID showed up, and I really retired.

Until this summer, when I was asked to try and help educate a bunch of State Health Officers on the subject of food safety. The ask was by the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers (ASTHO), an organization of which I was once their President before moving on to DC and the USDA. ASTHO and the FDA had received a federal grant to try and help improve food safety by improving the knowledge level of the people leading their state’s health efforts.

Most of the State Health Officers (SHOs) are MDs, like I was when Governor Johanns appointed me as his SHO. Most of the SHOs, like me back when, know little about what is done to try and make food safer, nor why. They have been busy delivering babies, stitching up lacerations and treating high blood pressures. They likely don’t even use a thermometer to tell when their hamburger is properly grilled. But yet they are ultimately in charge of food recalls, consumer education, foodborne illness outbreak investigations, maybe restaurant inspections and, in some states, the safety and health of the meat and poultry industry front line workers.

I think most SHOs would be hard pressed to explain how you get sick from Listeria by eating a fully cooked meat or poultry product, or why the USDA has Catfish (I’m sorry, Siluriformes) inspection but no other fish (Thank you, Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss, for further scrambling our food safety system).

So I traveled to Chapel Hill, N.C., and gave a presentation for ASTHO to a group of SHOs to try and bring my audience a little more up to speed on the status of food safety in the U.S. by looking back at history with a message I called "Three Seminal Moments in Food Safety History in the U.S."

Tom Johnston, Meatingplace editor and blogger coordinator, has offered to run a three-part series over the coming weeks to take a look at each of my three seminal moments. I hope you enjoy, and I hope you will let me know where I am right and where I am wrong in my opinion of the top three food safety changers in U.S. history.

The first of the three-part series will run Jan. 2.

The Three Seminal Moments in Food Safety History

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