Not a single day goes by when we don’t hear about the critical importance of food safety. We need to develop, embrace and encourage a robust food-safety culture, we’re told.

USDA recently announced that it is planning on requiring meat companies to begin placing additional safe-handling labeling on steaks that are mechanically or needle-tenderized.

HACCP is an ingenious, science-based system that has dramatically improved food safety in the U.S.

In recent years, we have actually begun to see a decline in the number of foodborne-illnesses outbreaks.

The Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has been working for months now on a new approach to validate the effectiveness of existing Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) systems.

Like it or not, we are in the midst of election season. Most of us cannot turn on a television or read a newspaper without being subject to a blitz of attacks on one candidate or another’s credibility.

It is said that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. That axiom certainly holds true when dealing with food safety.

In recent months, the beef industry in general, and BPI in particular, have fallen victim to a cultural and media firestorm that continues to do damage to the food industry.

In my column last month (“USDA policies drag down processors who ‘test and find’, The National Provisioner, March 2012), I discussed how current FSIS policy (which invariably reacts critically to any positive testing results) discourages companies from aggressively testing to find pathogens in their products.

Microbiological sampling can be an effective tool to help companies verify that their interventions are working. But how much testing is really expedient given the current food-safety climate?