Sometimes I fancy myself a bit of a headlines writer — so much fun to take pop culture and puns and adjust it to the content.  An op-ed of mine was published in the Raleigh News & Observer today and the headline was great: Companies must come clean on food safety. I didn’t write it.

Here’s the op-ed:

RALEIGH — Since last September more than 520 cases of salmonella typhimurium have been linked to products from Peanut Corporation of America. PCA’s peanut butter and paste products are used by many food companies and in many products, including Kellogg’s, NutriSystem and Luna bars.
It’s unknown how salmonella made its way into the peanut butter, but it’s a hardy pathogen, and in addition to peanut butter it’s been associated with almonds, sesame seeds, tahini and chocolate.
The high-fat content of these foods protects salmonella from the environment and in the gut, so only a small dose is needed to make someone sick. If salmonella is in a product such as peanut butter, there’s little that a consumer can do other than to cook the food (envision fried peanut butter crackers).
More than 800 products have been recalled to date, highlighting the interconnectedness of our food system and showing how one company’s problem can quickly impact the entire industry (The always prepared Girl Scouts quickly announced that none of their cookies are made with PCA products).
There’s now a climate of uncertainty over what to buy, eat and discard — is all peanut butter unsafe? What about whole peanuts? Some consumers will be vigilant and check the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s searchable database (www.fda.gov/oc/opacom/hottopics/salmonellatyph.html). Others will just stay away from peanut products altogether.
Naturally, there has been a push for greater oversight of the food industry, with more inspectors and inspections. President Barack Obama has used the salmonella outbreak to announce a review of the FDA’s functions.
Inspection is part of the answer, but it’s not as though inspectors have magical salmonella-detecting glasses.
Inspectors can help point out where there might be food safety system breakdowns, but what’s more important is what happens when the inspectors aren’t around.
Can a company identify and address risks associated with its products? Can company officials create an environment in which everyone values food safety and shares the same goals?
A crackdown on the food industry, and the resulting fear of getting caught, might work to change practices in the short term. A better long-term goal is to focus on creating a society that values food safety and compels folks to ask more questions where they buy food, whether at the supermarket, in restaurants or at farmers’ markets.
A segment of consumers (especially peanut-butter-product eaters right now) is already looking for more information about food safety. Asking questions creates pressure on the industry to demonstrate a safety culture, where everyone within an organization has shared values about how not to make customers sick.
It’s time for the really good companies to step up, open their doors and show everyone how they make sure that outbreaks don’t happen to them. Not their inspection or audit results, but a compelling story of how they identify and control risks.
Recapturing lost trust in a chaotic post-outbreak atmosphere could be the biggest return on all our food safety dollars, especially if companies can back it up and start marketing their food safety efforts.
Ben Chapman is a food safety extension specialist at N.C. State University.