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

该项目旨在培养一名研究生进行实证科学研究的方法，探讨影响食品供应链监管中有效数据跟踪的因素。越来越普遍的食源性疾病的爆发引起了全世界对我们食品安全的恐慌。例如，2014年，仅欧盟就发布了3792次食品召回警报，范围从危险细菌到有缺陷的包装。这些食品污染物的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——纳入其确保全球食品供应安全的举措中。公共卫生官员认为，记录食品的来源和途径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安全、质量和食品生产者知识的价值。了解当地食品生产条件与食品安全法规之间的冲突，对于制定更好的政策以保护所有美国人免受食品污染物的危害至关重要。在这个项目中，格雷戈里·科勒在加州大学欧文分校基思·墨菲博士的指导下，将调查数据收集和食品供应链监管的动态。科勒先生将通过对一家乳品合作社的人种学研究，考察食品可追溯性如何既是知识生产的工具，又是一种治理机制，考察食品可追溯性如何从健康领域扩展到更普遍的供应链管理领域。方法包括在奶牛合作社总部和成员农场进行参与性观察，与农民、管理者、检查员和监管人员进行访谈，基于视频的语言人类学数据收集和分析，以及涉及与举报人合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，这项研究的结果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.