LSU AgCenter food safety specialist Achyut Adhikari explains how the new Food Safety Modernization Act will affect small fruit and vegetable producers during the Farm to Table International symposium in New Orleans in August. (Photo by Rick Bogren)

News Release Distributed 08/18/15

NEW ORLEANS – Moving food from the farm to the dinner table – and everywhere else people eat – is a complex system, experts said at the Farm to Table International Symposium recently.

Farm to table is collapsing the supply chain by bringing together local producers and consumers, including individuals, restaurants and commercial establishments, said Philip Dobard, vice president of the Southern Food and Beverage Institute.

Dobard, vice president of the SoFAB Institute, was among the presenters representing a wide array of opinions and insights on best practices for urban farming, bringing products to market, sourcing locally, sustainability and the looming Food Safety Modernization Act along with many other topics.

The annual event brought together people interested in the growing farm-to-table movement to discuss producing, distributing and consuming locally sourced food and drink. The program was presented in partnership with the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, the SoFAB Institute and the LSU AgCenter.

The program comprised presentations on cultivating, distributing and consuming food and drink sourced locally to globally and included trends and developments in food science, security and safety.

A leading area of interest was the Food Safety Modernization Act, which includes proposed produce safety rules to develop risk-based on-farm preventive control programs and practices that will help protect producers’ legal liability, maintain markets and expand to new markets.

Passed in 2010, the act imposes preventive controls, inspection and compliance responses as well as regulations on imported food safety, said Elvis Cordova, U.S. Department of Agriculture deputy under secretary for marketing and regulatory programs.

The Food and Drug Administration is responsible for establishing rules and regulations, Cordova said.

The USDA’s role is to facilitate farm product marketing, which is funded by user fees, said Leanne Skelton, USDA liaison to FDA on issues related to the Food Safety Modernization Act.

None of the rules is yet final, Skelton said. “The FDA’s job is to protect public health, in this case, the nation’s food supply,” she said. “We want as safe and healthy a food supply as possible.”

Product safety includes on-farm practices with fresh produce using risk-based hazard analysis.

Producers with sales below $25,000 per year are exempt, Skelton said. Also exempt are products for personal consumption, that are rarely consumed raw and that are processed and not intended for raw consumption.

Nevertheless, “your customers may still require your being in compliance,” Skelton said.

The goal of food safety is control, said LSU AgCenter food safety specialist Achyut Adhikari. “We need to prevent contamination – keep it out, destroy it through cooking and prevent multiplication by controlling the environment.”

The focus of the food safety act is on raw products that won’t be cooked or processed but eaten in their natural state. “That’s why we have regulations,” said Adhikari. “Most of them are focused on prevention.”

The food safety process needs protocols – best practices to manage cross-contamination, Adhikari said. “We need to develop procedures that are viable and can be used by small growers.”

USDA risk assessment of on-farm safety includes soil amendments, worker health, equipment, animals and water, Adhikari said. This includes water used for irrigation and used for processing.

Even though smaller farms are exempt, they are still subject to other regulations. “You cannot eliminate risk, but you can manage it,” Adhikari said.

In another presentation, David Shields, chairman of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation and a faculty member at the University of South Carolina, talked about food history and the recovery of lost flavors.

The Gold Rice Foundation is using 19th century agricultural publications to identify heirloom varieties and landrace plants that are ancient or primitive cultivated varieties.

“We’re looking at a complex of field or garden cultivars that were central to crop rotations,” Shields said. “We went back to find the most enduring, central things, then went out to find them on a want list.”

Landrace grains, for example, are more ancient, he said. “They were developed by hundreds of human generations and thousands of plant generations.”

Based on the heirloom and landrace plants they found in searches of old gardens and commercial producers, the foundation has accumulated a host of plants that have fallen out of commerce. Now, they want to use them for developing new varieties.

“Myths are often disappointing,” Shields said of heirloom plants. “You can’t fight the historical tides of taste. Tastes do change.”

The foundation is urging geneticists to use the “found” cultivars to breed new varieties for taste using old plant materials. “After all, it’s because they tasted splendid,” he said.

Rick Bogren