By Johanna Y. Andrews Trevino, PhD Candidate, Food Policy and Applied Nutrition, Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Tufts University, and 2016 Next Generation Delegate
I recently had the opportunity to join my fellow Next Generation Delegates at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs' 2016 Global Food Security Symposium. The theme of this year´s symposium, “’Growing Food for Growing Cities,” provided both a reaffirmation of the progress we have made in addressing the food needs of our rapidly growing population and a sobering, yet valuable reminder of the many challenges we still face.
One of the challenges most often overlooked in this conversation is our ability to ensure continuous access to safe food, an aspect as fundamental as the quantity and nutritional content of food. As our population grows and becomes more concentrated in cities, larger amounts of food will have to travel longer distances, resulting in even more complex food chains than the ones we operate today. With these changes, we cannot ignore either the market-structure food system challenges or opportunities we will face in the upcoming decades. Nor can we ignore our need for safe food.
During the symposium discussions, one expert panelist highlighted the fact that in the United States we enjoy one of the safest and lowest cost food systems in the world, something we often take for granted. Every so often, scandals like listeria in our cantaloupes and E. coli in our burritos make us question the efficiency of our food safety system. But, overall, much of our food is safe to eat.
Despite the many advances and innovations for maintaining a reasonably safe food system in wealthier countries and for well-to-do consumers, safe food systems are not the norm in many other parts of the world. For this reason, I have focused my dissertation research on the potential role of naturally occurring toxins, called aflatoxins, on birth outcomes and infant growth in the Terai regions of Nepal. While exposure to acute aflatoxicosis is rare in countries with safe foods systems like the United States, aflatoxins have had deadly consequences in the past decades in Kenya, and the effects of chronic exposure are not yet clearly understood. Aflatoxins still plague many food systems in Africa and Latin America and are thought to also have a notable negative impact in Asian settings. While aflatoxins have been actively studied from an agricultural perspective and aflatoxin B1 has been shown to have carcinogenic effects, aflatoxins are poorly understood from a general public health and nutrition perspective. Plus, with climate change, we are seeing aflatoxin producing species in areas where they were not previously present.
In our globalized world, food safety has no borders. We frequently experience scandals, albeit of varying levels of severity, both locally and transnationally, and in both developed and developing countries. Food safety debacles range from tampered food items that do not make us sick to episodes of widespread fatal human poisoning. With the more alarming food safety problems in mind, we must start asking ourselves how we will ensure safe transport of enormous volumes of food from distant farms to consumers in our ever growing complex, global food system and highly urbanized world.
We may also ask ourselves how many past food safety scandals could have been avoided? We will never know, but we do know improved food quality and reduction of food contaminants and pathogens is incredibly important for the health of the growing world population. Alongside the increased complexity of our growing food system, consumers will demand safer, more reliable and verifiable foods. Consumers, whether rich or poor, expect and deserve transparency in the food products they are consuming.
With all the past food safety improvements in mind, together with our technical and political capabilities, ensuring safe food for all 9 billion people in the world´s future is not an untenable goal. In order to efficiently address this challenging topic of producing both a sufficient and safe food supply, I encourage viewing this challenge as a once in a lifetime opportunity to design an integrated approach that puts volume, nutritional quality and safety of food on equal footing. Our integrated approach should acknowledge both the existing challenges and opportunities and welcome innovative approaches to address our burgeoning globalized food system.
Read previous posts in the Next Generation Delegation 2016 Commentary Series: