Farm-to-table: A Situation Awareness Model for Food Safety Assurance for Porous Borders

Aldous Huxley's Brave NewWorld (1932) was far more prescient to the situation of food safety today than we dare to consider. When people are seduced rather than compelled to live in harmony, evil is not so obvious because no one is looking. In the instance of food safety, changes in world trade, consumer demand for variety, and an increasingly complex regulatory system create challenges to effective vigilance and mitigation. It remains a critical reality that in any "farm-to-table" scenario, multiple sources, suppliers, and steps along the process pose a threat to the safety of the product. Here we discuss the effect of "porous borders" with reference to spread of disease and bio-threats to food fabrication practices and regulatory agencies. We show that understanding correspondences between the morphology of global food production and product tracing/tracking technologies are critical to the real-time performance of situation awareness prediction systems. Our reconstruction of the events associated with securing safe food opens a pathway to advancing the primitives necessary for an appropriate real-time knowledge-sharing system for start-to-finish data sources that assist detection/prediction assurance models.