Food Regulations

Developments in Food Regulatory Systems  

Modern food systems are diverse and complex, involving everything from subsistence farming to multinational food companies. where everyone relies on food systems, whether local or global as everyone has to eat. The movement of food and food ingredients in food systems includes animals and animal products, plants and plant products, minerals, and vitamins.
 
The emergence of megacities has been a major driver of food regulatory changes, bringing together large populations within defined boundaries and requiring complex governance to deliver sufficient quantities and quality of food, where advances in food storage, with hematic sealing and other curing methods, have given tremendous improvements in food safety and regulations. Further, the use of animal transport, sailing ships, and trains to move larger volumes than can be carried by individuals, i.e., trade in ingredients like salt as well as live animals and agricultural products, as well as increased political and military conflict for resources also have impacted furthering regulatory requirements for the food equally along the supply chain developments. The existence of extensive trading routes over the globe for salt, spices, tea, and pepper for thousands of years has further helped the improvements in regulatory space.
 
Nonetheless, the Iron Age and the Roman Empire brought expanding empires and the beginning of global food regulations, including regional specialization in products traded throughout empires. Food regulations began to be organized alongside the food systems on a grand scale to feed larger cities and fuel local economies, where trade networks for grain, nuts, oils, fruit, and wine developed using both roadways and sailing routes, which depended on standardized weights and measures that were established along the supply chains with the expansion of money and accounting.
 
The Middle Ages saw the emergence of the merchant class and banknotes. Prior to the Middle Ages, selling was considered a task for one of the lower classes of civilization, The Middle Ages also saw banknotes replacing coinage, first with the Song dynasty in China and then later in Europe around 1661. As a wealthy class emerged, they became more sophisticated in their food preferences, where the resulting demand of consumers began to impact on the quality and the safety of the food trade in addition to the supply.
 

Science and technology represent another major driver for regulator developments, changing the way that food is grown, processed, preserved, and transported. The Industrial Age brought a transition from manual labor and draft animal–based economies to machines, which further increased in agricultural productivity brought about by technology such as the seed drill, the iron plow, and the threshing machine freed up labor for the factories in the 1700s, where the Industrial Revolution also created per-capita income growth. The emerging middle class had discretionary income to spend on its food preferences. Transportation breakthroughs were ushered in during the Industrial Age, where canal systems, improved roadways, steam engines used for traction, railroads, and steamships helped the expansion of the food industry that required controls to safeguard consumers. Food preservation, important to both the storage and transport of food, also changed over time, where drying was one of the early food preservation methods, certainly known in ancient times, improved due to the involvement of technology. Fermentation also was an early method of food preservation, with pasteurization applied to wine in China as early as 1117. Salting of food has been used for at least 500 years, beginning when the fishing fleets from Europe used drying and salting to store fish caught in Newfoundland and the Grand Banks in order to get them back to consumers in Europe. Two preservation methods, canning, and freezing, allowed food to be stored and transported in an almost-fresh state. Canning grew out of military research in 1810. Ice storage was developed in northern climates where ice could be cut from lakes in the winter for use later in the year. Commercial refrigeration followed in the 1800s. The first refrigerated ship, the SS Dunedin in 1882, revolutionized the meat and dairy industries in Australia and New Zealand, where refrigerated and frozen food products now could be traded globally.
 
The 20th century saw the intensification of agricultural production with the mechanization of planting and harvesting, selective breeding of animals and plants, and more attention to animal nutrition and feed input costs. Increased scale of production drove down the per-unit cost of products and fostered greater specialization in food systems. Advances in plant and animal disease control also helped, such as the movement of pigs and poultry indoors to decrease disease exposure and to enhance efficiency by controlling the environment. Colonization and war have been important political influences on food systems, where food regulations have begun to emerge, creating distributed ownership of food systems and highlighting a need for global regulatory agreements. Colonialism allowed for population growth in the industrialized countries where there were limited domestic opportunities to create employment or to grow food. Thus, settler colonies captured market opportunities for the colonizing country's exports and provided import sources for raw materials, including food and food ingredients. Trade underwent dramatic changes in the 20th century as a result of the two world wars. The war-associated food shortages, economic crises, and disease spread set the stage for global trade agreements as well as regulatory agreements where organizations were designed to address global public food issues. The 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was created to reduce tariff-based trade barriers and to prevent the downward spiral of world trade seen in the Great Depression from 1929 to 1933. Monthly trade dropped from $3.0 billion in January 1929 to $0.9 billion in March 1933 as protectionist measures reduced trade worldwide.
 

Up to the 20th century many countries had supply-driven economies, but newly amended policies favored increased agricultural production to ensure adequate domestic supplies of basic feedstuffs, where increased the supply with reduced the costs of foods were political slogans of popular national priorities at the time. Thus, self-sufficiency in food was a powerful motivation, especially for countries that had experienced food shortages in the past. Hence countries that exceeded domestic demand used export markets and food aid programs to deal with the excess, which created a demand-driven economy. Rising discretionary incomes in Europe and North America in the 20th century impacted food demand, regulatory control, and global food trade. Rising consumer demand for chicken drove the development of the broiler industry while creating considerable food safety risks for the mass populations as mass production and transportation systems can be vulnerable to the spread of disease and food poisoning emergencies, where food regulations became part of the food systems, creating global food safety regulations to prevent problems before happening. Further, food systems are dynamic and ever-changing in response to natural forces e.g., weather, demographics such as the emergence of megacities, economics i.e., currency values, technological advances in processing such as high-pressure pasteurization, entrepreneurism, or development and marketing of new products, and consumer preferences, which adapted continuous improvements to keep up with the face. As a result of these constant changes, food systems, and their regulations are increasingly complex, requiring complex regulatory systems for assuring global food safety.
 
Preferably, the recent technological developments in tracking and monitoring food trade supply chains are extensive, i.e., cold chains, which in essence are responsible for keeping perishable foods frozen until they reach their final retail markets. While refrigeration is most likely an energy-intensive activity, the need for food supply chains to reduce product waste and ensure food safety to end markets is in line with current global food security. Leading cold supply chain logistics companies use applications such as computational fluid dynamics systems that can correct inefficiencies at pre-cooling stages. Radiofrequency, wireless sensors, and thermal imaging neural networks round out the technological advancements to keep food frozen to ensure greater food safety of shipped products. The use of DNA barcoding to speciate products (i.e., finfish fillets) sold and consumed is a truly effective regulatory tool according to the published studies. From a food safety perspective, some consumers may have allergies to certain types of products (i.e., finfish) even though allergens are not declared by species, where mislabeling leads to lost consumer trust in the safety of seafood products, undermining efforts toward sustainable marine ecosystem management. Fraud may in this context be a more important issue with regard to species mislabelling, where consumers unfairly pay the price of a more expensive species.
 

Another technological development making its way into food supply chains, and which can lend itself to food safety is blockchain, because, food traceability is very challenging for companies, retailers, and government regulating authorities because of the myriad modifications that can take place with ingredients, bacteria or viruses for example. While blockchain may still be relatively new as an application, this technology may become more integrated into food-tracking systems for regulatory controls. Blockchain algorithms have the potential to store data and enable quick tacking across many supply chain process steps, giving stakeholders the ability to monitor much faster. Another futuristic possibility is to use blockchain to detect food safety parameters, such as microbial infestation or contamination, such as mold toxins, heavy metals, pesticides, or allergens. Blockchain can also indicate concerns over geographic origin or biological and chemical identity and methods of production. Combining blockchain with the data points tracking with an Internet-of-Things, especially in the food trade would be a powerful framework for revolutionizing the food industry.

 
References
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK114491/
https://cdn.dal.ca/content/dam/dalhousie/pdf/sites/agri-food/Benchmarking%20Food%20Safety%20-%20AAL%20FINAL%20Report.pdf
Ercsey-Ravasz M, Toroczkai Z, Lakner Z, Baranyi J. Complexity of the International Agro-Food Trade Network and Its Impact on Food Safety. PLoS ONE. 2012;7(5):e37810.