UA Center for Food Safety ready to fight the enemy (with 1 photo)
Sept. 6, 2006Contact Information:By Dave Edmark, Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station
479-575-5647 / dedmark@uark.edu
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. —The newly activated Center for Food Safety at the University of Arkansas is taking an aggressive approach to its mission and the director knows his plan: prevent the problem before it arises.
"We've always operated on the premise of containment and reduction of pathogens," Steven C. Ricke explained. "If we can get the numbers down, we're happy because we've accomplished what we set out to do. Frankly, we have to start thinking about prevention of those pathogens from ever getting established. We have to create those kinds of barriers."
Ricke is the first person to hold the newly endowed Donald "Buddy" Wray Chair in Food Safety and is also the first director of the Center for Food Safety, a unit within the UA Division of Agriculture Institute of Food Science and Engineering. He joined the UA in January from the faculty of Texas A&M University. At the Fayetteville campus he holds appointments as a professor in the food science and poultry science departments.
“Focus on the biology of foodborne pathogens,” Ricke said. “If we know our enemy, we can fight it.”
The research philosophy that Ricke brings to the UA center is geared toward being able to predict pathogens’ behavior and staying a step ahead of their ability to do harm.
Ricke seeks to shift some of the conventional approach to food safety research – or, as he put it another way, change some mindsets.
Food safety research is starting to have the tools necessary to engage in preventative research, which Ricke acknowledged is more difficult than pathogen containment and reduction. But those who hold researchers accountable are beginning to ask about prevention, he said.
“I think we have to start having the mentality that it can be done and say it can be done as opposed to just saying we’re getting close,” Ricke said.
Prevention of pathogens is a responsibility at the front of the food production and processing chain. Ricke also sees responsibility at the consumer end of the chain. “We’ll do all we can but there are still opportunities for abuse at the end of that food cycle,” he said. “It’s our job to make people realize what they can do to make things better.”
Ricke seeks to attract diverse sources of funding for the Center for Food Safety. Part of the research there is within the USDA-supported Food Safety Consortium. Funding support also includes the university’s Wray Chair endowment that was made possible by charitable gifts from Tyson Foods and the Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation.
“We want to recruit the best talent and the best students,” Ricke said. “We want the best students who have the talent to do the things that we want to get done.”