Darryl Holliday with Kajun Kettle Foods in New Orleans, Ben Thibodeaux with Palace Café in New Orleans and Charlie Baggs and Adam Moore with Charlie Baggs Inc. in Chicago, from left to right, discuss differences in preparing foods for serving in restaurants and foods for large-scale commercial distribution during the Louisiana Food Processors Conference March 15 on the LSU AgCenter campus in Baton Rouge. (Photo by Rick Bogren. Click on photo for downloadable image.)

News Release Distributed 03/20/12

Food safety and value-added food processing and its potential for economic growth in Louisiana were featured at the 10th Louisiana Food Processors Conference March 14-15 in Baton Rouge.

Sponsored by the LSU AgCenter and Louisiana Economic Development, the conference brought together representatives from all segments of the state’s food industry, according to John Finley, head of the LSU AgCenter Department of Food Science.

Tracing food products and ingredients throughout the entire supply chain from producer to consumer is a global undertaking, said Ted Labuza, professor of food science and engineering at the University of Minnesota. For example, he said, 80 percent of the fish consumed in the United States are imported.

Traceability follows the food, feed and other components of the food chain, Labuza said. The challenge, he added, is that many products move through a series of brokers who may not take physical possession of them.

The difference between traceability and tracking is that tracking monitors a product through the system while tracing follows a product back through the system to its source.

New technology, Labuza said, is going to hook buyers’ computers to producers’ and processors’ computers so products can be monitored lot to lot. “If we don’t do something to people who do egregious things, people aren’t going to do things right.”

New Orleans restaurateur Dickie Brennan said he attended the conference because he’s interested in finding ways to use more local Louisiana products in his restaurants.

Ben Thibodeaux, chef de cuisine at Brennan’s Palace Café in New Orleans, said he’s interested in the ability to process and preserve in-season products for later use in the restaurants.

“We can buy more than we can ever use fresh,” Brennan said. “If we can can Creole tomatoes, for example, we can have them on our menus all year long.”

He said he’s interested in local Louisiana products not only for his use but possibly for retail sales.

Brennan was particularly interested in the presentation by Charlie Baggs, whose company works with product development from the restaurant to the store shelf.

“What we have today in restaurants is quite amazing,” Baggs said. “If you want to create products in the laboratory and you want to commercialize them, you have to use similar products,” Baggs said.

Some ingredients that are used in small quantities in a kitchen or restaurant won’t stand up to the challenges of large-scale commercial production, he said. Recipes have to be replicated, so some ingredients have to be broken down into their components and replaced with chemical equivalents.

“You can’t serve 7 million people with home gardens,” said Roger A. Clemens. “The difference between what grandma did in the kitchen and what industry does is capacity.”

Clemens, chief scientific officer with the E.T. Horn Company and current president of the Institute of Food Technologists, said up to 50 percent of the world’s crops are lost post-harvest because of improper processing and packaging.

Food science in on a collision course, Clemens said. One of the largest contributors to salt in the diet is baked goods, but dieticians say our diets need more fiber or whole grains, which primarily come from baked goods. We’re also told our diets lack potassium and have too much sodium, but potatoes, which are high in both, are spurned because they are high in starch.

The food processing industry has “the opportunity and responsibility to produce the foods to meet the needs of the world,” Clemens said. But “geography hinders the availability of food. Food is global.”

Foods and food safety are enhanced through biotechnology, said Charles Santerre, professor of food toxicology in nutrition science at Purdue University.

“People don’t understand what would happen if we stopped processing food,” Santerre said, pointing out that Americans spend only 10 percent of their disposable income on food.

Biotechnology can improve food characteristics, such as extending shelf life of perishable products like tomatoes, he said. In addition, genetic modifications can change plants to reduce insect damage or even reduce toxins present in the harvested crop.

An estimated 60 to 80 percent of processed foods in the United States contain an ingredient from a biotech crop, Santerre said. And “there’s no way” a genetically modified component in an animal’s diet can be amplified and appear in any milk or meat.

In addition, Santerre said he’s seen no documented instances of a biotech crop in the marketplace causing a new food allergy.

There is a difference between food security and food safety, said Frank Busta, director emeritus and senior science advisor to the National Center for Food Protection and Defense, in the Department of Homeland Security.

Food security refers to supply sufficiency, and food safety refers to system reliability. Another component is food defense, which Busta termed system resiliency.

“You can’t have food quality without food safety, and you can’t have food safety without food defense,” Busta said.

Food safety looks at reducing exposure to natural hazards, errors and unintentional failures, he said. Food defense, on the other hand, is concerned with intentional threats to the food system.

“The only way to address food safety is from primary production through the supply chain to the consumer,” Busta said. And many principles of food defense are similar to those used in addressing food safety.

The important differences in food defense, Busta said, are that investigators look at “unnatural” contamination and familiar materials in unfamiliar places. In addition, law enforcement comes into play in concerns about food defense.

Many problems with food defense are with deliberate contamination not associated with terrorist threats, Busta cautioned. These can include such things as actions by disgruntled employees or using adulterated ingredients.

The key to increasing the food supply is to eliminate waste through processing and storage, said Mike Strain, commissioner of the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry.

“Water is going to be the greatest issue of our time,” Strain said. “We’re running out of ground water.”