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NZFSSRC FUTURES
NZFood Safety Science Research Centre Futures Forum
Predicting the food safety future – an approximate science
This article has been written exclusively for Food NZ by the NZ Food Safety Science & Research Centre, by director Dr Libby Harrison and science writer Glenda Lewis
Back from the future
The future is another country, speaking another language. We don’t even have the language for the future, because most things do not yet exist. Imagine going back to visit colleagues in December 1999 to prime them for the changes ahead. You are asked to present at a food safety futures forum at Massey University. How can you possibly get across the impact of the mobile phone revolution and the flavour of the posttruth world? The audience sit open-mouthed, confused and sceptical at the same time. You change tack and assure them that food is still pretty much the same, that there's more of it, and fewer people in the world are hungry. Despite a rise in veganism, the middle classes in China and India are growing enormously and have an appetite for our meat, seafood and dairy. The same old pathogens are still around but DNA technologies, now affordable, are helping manage them. They roll their eyes at the range of plant milks. They completely dismiss the idea of cellular agriculture. The rules of this time travel game mean that you can’t warn them about imminent natural or man-made disasters – the killer heatwaves, floods, fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, terrorist attacks, and wars. So you can’t tell them about the pandemic either – instead you give covert warnings about the fragility of just-intime supply lines, dependence on transient labour, and putting all their eggs in one export basket. Your pause for effect meets blank stares. You ask them to think about what would happen to their businesses if the border closed. They frown at this science-fictional notion and start losing interest. The lunch trolley arrives – just in time. You note that there are no vegetarian or vegan alternatives with post-it note labels. They avoid you.
Looking for the future
The NZ Food Safety Science & Research Centre held a futures forum on 8 September, attended by food safety leaders from industry, science and government. The programme consisted of a series of presentations in the morning, and workshops in the afternoon for industry sectors, followed by a draw-down of what it all meant – potentially – for the Centre and its research agenda. There was no well-informed prophet returning from the world in 2050, and the first presenter, futurist Melissa Clark-Reynolds, acknowledged that ‘futurology’ is all pretty hairy guesswork, and that the crystal ball is scratched and opaque from about 18 months out. To underline the point she quoted sweeping predictions by various illustrious commentators from the past, all since proven amusingly wrong. It seems the more ‘expert’ a person is on a subject, the less able they are to predict its future development. Random members of the public do better, according to The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. Despite the upfront caveats, attendees were enthralled by Melissa’s taster of things to come, based on hints and signals already in the market. Their attentiveness suggested that many of these were new to people, or they had not picked them as powerful trends. For example, she noted the burgeoning of online subscription models, citing My Food Bag and Nespresso as good examples. From your desk, you buy a year’s worth of those coffee capsules for Mother’s Day, then feel obliged to keep buying year on year – by this time your mother has a serious caffeine addiction. That’s the same marketing psychology that caused National Geographic pile-ups in bookshelves and garages. You don’t want to cut off the supply. Food is becoming a very popular gift. The rise of online pre-ordering takes a lot of the financial risk and waste out of production. You produce only what you know you can sell. Trouble is, direct ordering of food products has the potential to throw up novel food safety challenges that will need to be addressed. The trend to people working from home, for at least part of the
week, is here to stay, because it has clear productivity and cost saving advantages for employers, and obvious benefits for working parents and long-range commuters. This dramatic change has consequences for food purchasing and dietary habits. Hard to come to terms with is the production of exact copies of human breast milk. That’s here and now, too. Think of the possible implications of that. A minor but interesting new trend is the proliferation overseas of CBD (cannabidiol is the medicinal, but not intoxicating, component of cannabis) drinks and food. Although only a small percentage of the population are fully-committed vegans, many more people are buying vegan products to reduce the amount of meat they are consuming. Younger people, Melissa bets, will spurn, indeed be revolted by, some of the foods older generations eat now – just as baby boomers swap horror stories about the tripe, junket and lambs tongues they were forced to eat as children. Tastes change. Barbecue flavoured insect crisps? Yum! Precision agriculture will be the big game changer. We’ll get used to the idea and future generations will find it hard to believe that we slaughtered and ate lambs and piglets on an industrial scale. Probably. Maybe. But where will the cellular feedstock come from and when will it become affordable? Vertical farming is bound to take off. Greens, tomatoes and berries will be produced on the doorsteps of urban dwellers – not hundreds of miles away – saving land, water, and pesticides, as well as fuel. Sending mesclun from the water-poor West Coast of America to New York will soon seem insane. A reduction in land required for conventional agriculture might mitigate the problem of humans encroaching wild animal habitats, creating highways for disease and future pandemics. The COVID-19 pandemic, Melissa concludes, was a food safety failure.
Harvesting big data for trends
The following presenter, Helen Darling of Sumfood Ltd, looks at big data to discern patterns and trends in food issues. Despite our remarkable progress in feeding the world, the food system is stretched and stressed, she said, with a tenth undernourished and a quarter overweight. There are huge bottlenecks – the Ukraine war is preventing shipments of grain to countries desperate for it, while there are reports of China hoarding large amounts of grain and holding huge strategic reserves of other products, and the recent Pakistan flood has impacted food transportation in that region. Helen says food safety and security cannot be separated. She defines food security as access to safe, nutritious, affordable food. Despite significant investment in systems to protect food supplies, a sizeable proportion of global food production continues to be contaminated, adulterated, or otherwise wasted. Food fraud is costing billions every year. Then there’s the cost of cyberattacks on companies which are only likely to increase unless managers get smart fast and invest more in IT security. An attack on the JBS meat processing company stopped the works in Australia, Canada and the US. They paid a US$11m ransom. COVID-19, Helen said, has taught us a lot about supply line vulnerabilities. In Iowa, more than half a million pigs had to be euthanized and destroyed when labour shortages due to COVID infection among workers forced the closure of processing plants. Closer to home, warming seas killed over a thousand tonnes of salmon in Marlborough. The proverbial canary down the coal mine. Helen says that innovation is happening in garages and home offices these days, not so much inside the big companies. They buy the IP once developed. She says resilience and sustainability will be the key investment criteria now. “We need leadership, and the power is in this room,” was her final, stirring exhortation.
Small things with huge impacts
Following on from Helen’s space station view of the global situation, Craig Billington of ESR took a microscopic view of the future. Craig is a molecular microbiologist with 20 years’ experience in researching food and water risks. We take safety for granted, he says, but floods can be pathogen super-spreaders as the Havelock North Campylobacter outbreak showed. He echoed the warning about inevitable future pandemics due to our proximity to wildlife habitats. The next one could be foodborne and/or transmitted by agricultural animals. He pointed out that there are coronaviruses affecting pigs, chickens and cattle, and with recombination these could make the leap to human hosts. There was a sharp rise in antibiotic-resistant organisms during the pandemic when scientific attention necessarily shifted from mitigating the significant risk they pose to beating COVID-19. Regardless of how good our own antibiotic management practices are, we are open to international travel and trade from countries with poor stewardship. He warned delegates to keep their eye on antimicrobial resistance in the Gram-negative bacteria (these have an extra cell membrane making them harder to kill) – namely, Salmonella, E.coli, Campylobacter, Pseudomonas – which can form persistent biofilms in processing facilities. The switch from petrochemical fertilisers to biological sources may come with increased pathogen risks. Compost can harbour allergens, spores, pathogenic bacteria, and toxic breakdown products. Plant growth-promoting microbes (PGPs) can also be applied directly onto plants – they help nutrient uptake just like bacteria in the human gut. But some of these PGPs are also opportunistic human pathogens and if the plants internalise these bacteria, such as Pseudomonas, and the plant is eaten uncooked, then people may be at risk, particularly those with compromised immunity. Such risks are compounded as the population ages and becomes more susceptible to disease. Greater crop and animal densities will also increase microbial risks. Biowastes will be more geographically concentrated and these condensed food growing areas will attract more pests such as birds, which are disease vectors without borders. If only export distribution was as direct as the bird flies. Continuing difficulties with air transport and shipping will result in increased spoilage. Our fruit does not like waiting on the vine, long sea voyages, or sitting around in warm ports. The shift to new materials for more sustainable food packaging options may compromise temperature control and be more liable to leakage. Novel foods with modified textures could provide new safe harbours for pathogens. Nutrient dense foods may also nourish large populations of microorganisms. It is estimated that 95% of microorganisms cannot be cultured, so the advent of metagenomics is a giant leap forward to unlocking our understanding of the microbial flora of foods and agricultural systems. Instead of concentrating on individual pathogens, the focus will be on analysing collective samples to identify any genes for allergens, toxicity, etc. Further, as the newly available detection technologies are relatively low-cost, give almost instant results and are easy to use, consumers may start to routinely test the foods they buy, leading to a mini-revolution in food safety practice. “Low cost analytical tools and open databases democratise independent assessment,” says Craig. He worries (his job is to worry) that large-scale precision fermentation could also be vulnerable to growth of pathogens at the same time – huge quantities of them. In the short to medium term, Craig thinks insect protein is a more viable alternative protein source. “They can be grown on food waste, and the whole process is low-tech, whereas the cellular medium for precision fermentation is complex, difficult to make from non-animal sources, and the process is very high-tech. We’ll see. But we do need to be wary of unintended consequences,” says Craig.
But wait – there’s more!
The audience were also provoked and entertained by presentations from Sarah Nelson (ESR) on climate change and food safety, and Mark Gahegan (UoA) on artificial intelligence and robotics. The presentations and a summary of discussions and deliberations of the participants are at https://www.nzfssrc.org.nz/news/see-presentations-and-reportfrom-centre-futures-forum/#/ Director of the NZ Food Safety Science & Research Centre, Dr Libby Harrison, says the day fully met her expectations. “We invited speakers from outside our usual orbit, and they did not disappoint. We will likely make this a regular event. Delegates clearly indicated they want more. It gave us at the Centre a lot to think about. What is our wider role in food security? We have helped companies learn how to use whole genome sequencing. Do we play the same training role with data management and metagenomics, which is the next phase in the DNA revolution? The survey of potential risks from such a multiplicity of sources showed just how much work we have in front of us. Food safety science must not lag behind these momentous changes.”
