Opinion An emerging body of scholarship argues that machine learning and artificial intelligence can solve food safety enforcement. By mining tweets and Yelp reviews, health departments can target inspections more effectively.  With much fanfare, health departments in Boston, New York City, Las Vegas and Chicago have experimented with using social media to send allocate enforcement resources to restaurants predicted to be non-compliant. As the Atlantic put it, predictive policing means “Yelp might clean up the restaurant industry.” Yelp’s…

Opinion Food companies have been at the forefront of technological innovation and scientific research and development for decades upon decades. Cursory attention to the items we eat — how those items are grown, sourced, processed, and packaged – provides ample evidence of scientific research and development and technological innovation in the food industry. Simultaneously, food companies are justifiably concerned about protecting their brand names, market share, liability risks, and consumer relations.   Over the most recent 30…

Opinion Editor’s note on the author: Michéle Samarya-Timm, a health educator and Registered Environmental Health Specialist working for Somerset (NJ) County Department of Health, originally wrote this column for barfblog.com. It is reprinted here with permission of barfblog founder Doug Powell. Baking pumpkin pies with Aunt Kay’s secret recipe. Watching “Miracle on 34th Street.” Preparing the dining room with the good china.  Diffusing political conversations at the dinner table. Some traditions give a sense of warmth, connection, and continuity, and…

Opinion The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s reorganization plan, which would relocate a key agricultural research agency outside Washington, DC, has drawn increasing criticism from those who know and depend on its economic and statistical analyses. First announced during Congress’s summer recess in August, the reorganization plan for the USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) has been closed off to congressional input and public comment — in stark contrast to other recent federal agency reorganization plans.…

­Opinion The USDA and FDA recently announced their historic agreement to jointly regulate meat grown from animal cells, helping pave the pathway to commercialization of what’s often called cultured meat, clean meat, and now the newest term: cell-based meat. Start-ups culturing meat and their supporters point out that cellular agriculture can theoretically produce vast amounts of meat with relatively few resources, all while leaving a lighter footprint on the planet and animals, as well as…

Contributed Many vendors at farmers markets take inadequate precautions to prevent the spread of foodborne illness, and they should be trained to reduce food-safety risks, according to Penn State researchers who completed the final phase of an innovative five-year study. Using a comprehensive three-way approach, the research assessed food safety behaviors at Pennsylvania farmers markets using direct concealed observations, state sanitarian observations, and self-reported vendor surveys. The results revealed key distinctions between observed vendor food-handling…