Hazard, Risk, and the Bobcat Problem

Every food safety professional has faced some version of this moment: a test comes back positive, a pathogen is detected, and the system kicks into gear. Product gets pulled, resources get deployed, decisions get made. And most of the time, that's the right call. But what happens when the system responds with equal urgency to a result that poses minimal actual risk to public health? What's the cost of that response, not just in dollars but in wasted food, wasted energy, and resources diverted from threats that matter more? And who gets to decide what "safe enough" actually means? In this new series of external-expert TAG Talks from The Acheson Group, TAG COO & EVP of Scientific and Regulatory Affairs Dr. Ben Miller welcomes Dr. Martin Wiedmann, lead author of "Balancing Food Safety and Sustainability: Trade-off Risk Assessments and Predictive Modeling,” to answer such questions, discuss why the food safety field needs to get more rigorous about weighing the unintended consequences of its own interventions, and propose new tools, including AI-assisted risk negotiation, to help with that.