Doctoral Dissertation Research: Effective Data Tracking in the Regulation of Food Supply Chains

该项目对研究生进行基于经验的科学研究方法进行培训，探索在食品供应链监管中影响有效数据跟踪的因素。越来越普遍的食源性疾病的爆发已经引起了全世界对我们食品安全的恐慌。例如，2014年，仅欧盟(EU)就发布了3792个食品召回警报，范围从危险细菌到有缺陷的包装。食品污染物的这些威胁促使世界卫生组织和联合国将食品可追溯性--追踪食品来源的能力--纳入他们确保全球食品供应安全的倡议中。公共卫生官员认为，有关食品来源和途径的文件是控制供应链风险的必要组成部分。然而，在实践中，食品可追溯性监管往往没有考虑到食品生产者的安全、质量和知识的价值。了解当地的食品生产条件如何与食品安全监管相冲突，对于制定更好的政策以保护所有美国人免受食品污染的危险至关重要。在这个项目中，格雷戈里·科勒将在加州大学欧文分校的基思·墨菲博士的监督下，研究食品供应链的数据收集和监管的动态。通过对一家乳制品合作社的人种学研究，科勒将通过考察食品可追溯性如何从健康领域扩展到更广泛的供应链管理，来检验食品可追溯性如何既作为知识生产的工具，又作为一种治理机制运作。这些方法包括在乳品合作社总部和成员农场的参与者观察，对农民、管理人员、检查员和监管者的访谈，基于视频的语言人类学数据收集和分析，以及涉及与告密者协作分析视频和音频数据的行为实验。除了增加关于食品监管对农业社区的社会影响的科学知识外，这项研究的发现还将为围绕数据跟踪在构建包括食品、国家安全和质量控制在内的各种问题的知识方面的作用的辩论提供信息。

This project, which trains a graduate student in methods of conducting empirically-grounded scientific research, explores the factors that influence effective data tracking in the regulation of food supply chains. The ever more prevalent outbreaks of food-borne illnesses have caused consternation across the world over the safety of our food. For example, in 2014, the European Union (EU) alone issued 3,792 food recall alerts, ranging from dangerous bacteria to defective packaging. These threats of food contaminants have pushed the World Health Organization and the United Nations to incorporate food traceability - the ability to track a food product's origins - into their initiatives for assuring a secure global food supply. Public health officials view documentation about food's origins and pathways as a necessary component of controlling risk within the supply chain. In practice, however, food traceability regulation often does not take the values of safety, quality, and knowledge of food producers into account. Understanding how the local conditions of food production conflict with food safety regulation is critical for developing better policies to protect all Americans from the dangers of food contaminants. In this project, Gregory Kohler, under the supervision of Dr. Keith Murphy of the University of California at Irvine, will investigate the dynamics of data collection and regulation of food supply chains. Through an ethnographic study of a dairy cooperative, Mr. Kohler will examine how food traceability operates both as a tool for knowledge production and as a mechanism of governance by looking at the ways food traceability has expanded outside the realm of health into supply chain management more generally. The methods include participant observation in the dairy cooperative headquarters and member farms, interviews with farmers, managers, inspectors, and regulators, video-based linguistic anthropological data collection and analysis, and behavioral experiments involving the collaborative analysis of video and audio data with informants. Besides increasing scientific knowledge of the societal effects of food regulation on farming communities, findings from this research will inform debates surrounding the role of data tracking in constructing knowledge across various issues, including food, national security, and quality control.