Following severe flooding that occurred throughout Vermont and New York, the Northeast Center to Advance Food Safety (NECAFS) has compiled a collection of resources to help growers impacted by floodwaters ensure produce safety.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (USDA’s APHIS) has announced 12 awards totaling more than $3.2 million in cooperative agreement funding to create antimicrobial resistance (AMR) dashboards. AMR is a crucial threat to food safety and global public health that is aggravated by the use of antimicrobials in food animal agriculture.
The Dutch government has partnered with the cultivated meat industry to develop a code of practice for the facilitation of taste tests for cell-cultured meat and seafood products prior to receiving market approval.
Following a May 2023 announcement of a new framework for systematic post-market reassessment for chemicals used in foods, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has released a public inventory of certain food ingredients and additives determined to have unsafe uses in food because they are unapproved, as well as lists of select chemicals currently under the agency’s review. FDA also shared insights about the agency’s work to enhance the assessment of ingredients in foods on the market.
The California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement (LGMA) has announced its Romaine Test and Learn initiative, a two-year food safety study commencing in October 2023, which will leverage LGMA members’ individual testing data to elicit meaningful, aggregated information to better understand potential microbial risks to leafy greens food safety.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA’s FSIS) has updated its sampling program for cell-cultured meat and poultry products, providing new instructions to inspection personnel and enforcement officers.
FAO has prepared a short factsheet for food safety authorities to grasp the contents of a previously released publication, titled, “Food Safety Aspects of Cell-Based Food.”