Food Safety can mean different things to different people — let alone to corporations or regulatory agencies.
But it ultimately has to do with how what we eat affects the quality of our Time.
By categorizing the known plants and animals as being safe or unsafe to eat, our species gradually developed foundational knowledge of what was possible.
Through experience and adaptation, we began to understand which Foods were best.
Early human cultures learned to select Foods based on their “life-giving properties” — items now understood to be nutrient-dense: containing a high ratio of nutrients to energy (calories).
Traditional preservation methods were vital to survival, particularly where long, dark winters had to be endured. It was crucial that Food stores remained safe to eat — they must continue to provide nourishment without causing illness.
Despite being fully biological, nature’s “grocery store” contains many toxins and other harmful substances that our species learned to contend with.
For example, although cassava and corn both became important staples in many traditional cultures, eating them raw or untreated causes serious health problems.
The traditional concept of Food Safety was centered on life.
Through countless millennia of empirical observation, trial-and-error, and the transmission of knowledge across generations, many traditional cultures came to master the process of safely extracting nutrients from their local ecosystems.
Once reliable nutrition was achieved, the concept of Food Safety was implicitly broadened to optimize long-term survival, life-giving properties, and social cohesion.
With the basics covered, our pattern recognition was directed towards these more advanced topics — all still centered on human life.
But in recent centuries, as the production of Trade Food came to dominate local geographies, displacing adherence to tradition and access to land, the concept of “Food Safety” began to change.
Food Safety has since become a burgeoning industry in its own right.
For the large corporations whose business is the production of Trade Food, the idea of producing Foods that were safe to eat was eclipsed by the commercial imperative of producing Foods that were safe to sell.
The compatibility of our biological and legal systems is often minimal and always delayed, creating a subtle difference between “safe to eat” and “safe to sell” Foods.
This difference ultimately comes down to Money and corporate liability.
As a separate “legal person,” corporations may be held accountable for harm caused to others by their actions, or the actions of their employees or representatives.
This is the basic meaning of corporate liability.
Harm from Food is a matter of biology, but whether there is sufficient cause to award Money damages is a matter of law — this is where things get complicated.
As humans, we never want the Foods we eat to cause us harm — regardless of whether that harm manifests in the short, medium, or long-term.
The problem is that the further into the future you go, the harder it becomes to connect the harm to the Food. While not impossible, this is a major legal hurdle.
Four decades passed between the first consumer lawsuits against tobacco companies and the American legal system recognizing a link between smoking and lung cancer — the original plaintiffs died long before this shift, receiving no compensation.
This delay between the first cigarette smoked and the onset of noticeable harm is why it took so long for the connection between smoking and cancer to be legally accepted.
Where harm is immediate or measurable in the short-term, it’s much easier to hold corporations accountable through the legal system.
Losing expensive lawsuits and being forced to pay major legal damages may threaten corporate existence. Producing “safe to sell” Foods minimizes this risk.
And since legal causation is much easier to achieve for more immediate harms, the production of Trade Food is heavily biased toward short-term Food Safety.
This creates a double-edged sword.
The financial incentives to eliminate short-term, biological pathogens from Trade Foods have caused our Food supply to become highly stable and ultra-sanitized.
Food borne illness in the industrialized world was dramatically reduced during the first half of the twentieth century — this is undeniably positive.
But these advances have since leveled off, and the numbers are starting to go up again.
After a century of sanitizing our Foods from short-term risks, many long-term harms are coming home to roost.
In this prolonged battle against microorganisms and contamination, our species’ longer-term nutrition has unfortunately become a casualty.
Newer methods of corporate production both strip Foods of their nutrients (the good stuff), while adding many new, non-biological components (the bad stuff).
The result?
Suffering acute harm from our Foods has become rarer — but the rates of longer-term diet-linked health problems and chronic disease are rising for modern humans.
Corporations are making more Money from producing “safe to sell” Trade Foods than ever before, but our species’ collective health is in decline.
“Food Safety” was traditionally about human life — corporations have made it about shelf life.
Before turning to how these changes affect human health (our Time), we must further explore how the use of Human Time has affected our Food.
From applying ancestral knowledge to engineering corporate trade secrets, our species has demonstrated much ingenuity when it comes to Food — but the deciding actors have centralized, and the goals have changed.