Think about how many times you have identified a food safety problem at a particular location that was repeated despite your multiple attempts to resolve it. I bet you could come up with a very long list. This reminds me of an old expression from Einstein that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results! One of the reasons that this happens is that food safety professionals are very good at identifying what went wrong, but too often we don’t identify why it went wrong. Regulations and regulatory programs tend to focus on violations of regulations: the whats, such as equipment or physical environment problems, and/or procedural problems. Industry food safety programs often focus on the whats as well. Both programs may have the attitude that it is someone else’s responsibility to figure out why the problem is happening and fix it, and their job is just to find the problem. Outbreak or contamination investigations historically have sought to find the contributing factors for the problem, which typically are related to equipment or physical environment or procedural issues. They also may limit their investigations to possible regulatory violations. Once again, these may be the whats but often are not the whys. Talk about getting back to the basics—is there a better way to think through preventing problems from reoccurring than through understanding why they happened in the first place?