Trail of food crosses borders

IT used to be that if a meal led to a close relationship with a toilet bowl, you didn’t need to look much further than your own kitchen for the malicious culprit.

Undercooked food was usually the culprit and the damage was generally done, or underdone, in your own oven.

Now meals come pre-cooked, pre-packaged, ready to eat or ready to reheat and if something goes wrong, it can take an international team to get to the bottom of it.

“There could be ingredients in a chicken kiev from 13 different countries never mind how many producers,” said Professor Patrick Wall of the UCD School of Public Health and Population Science, who until recently also chaired the European Food Safety Authority.

“If somebody gets sick from eating it, you have to find out was it the chicken, the garlic butter or the batter that caused it? If it was the garlic butter, where else was that supplied and what other meals did it go into? It makes traceability very difficult.”

Jeff Moon is head of consumer protection at the Foods Safety Authority of Ireland, which is involved in managing the outbreak of salmonella that has affected at least 119 people here, in the North, Britain and Finland since February. It is believed to have contributed to the death of a 77-year-old hospital patient in England.

Some of the ill ate sandwiches containing meat supplied by Dawn Farm Foods in Naas, Co Kildare, which has shut down production and has forensic microbiologists crawling all over it. But Dawn supplies chilled and frozen meats for sandwich filling, pizza toppings and ready-meals to more than 30 countries worldwide.

Their products appear in sandwich bars, supermarkets and restaurants, and because some are frozen, the full reach of the outbreak is hard to estimate.

“The modern food chain is very long,” said Mr Moon. “It goes from a producer in one country to a processor in another country to a distributor in another to consumers in another so we’re fully aware of the need for co-operation and communication between countries so that we have a quick response and good traceability. If it was possible to produce locally and eat locally the chain the would be much, much shorter but the reality is more complex.”

In Ireland, the FSAI is dealing with the consumer end of the crisis, the Health Protection Surveillance Centre is handling the medical side and the Department of Agriculture is looking after the production.

The team effort is replicated in most EU countries where a Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed operates and from there, warnings and information are exchanged with the rest of the world.

Would countries be better off closing the gates on imported food and keeping production local?

“We live in a world where economics is the main driver so if the balance of economics start tipping in favour of doing things another way, we might see a return to more locally sourced food products but we’re not seeing any signs of that at the moment.”