From its inception, the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety (FSIL) has sought to engage and empower women in research projects to increase access to safe, nutritious diets.  Women are significant contributors in agricultural production, food processing and household food preparation, which all present strategic opportunities to prevent the spread of foodborne pathogens. Despite composing 43 percent of the global agricultural workforce and up to 60 percent in parts of Africa and Asia,  women often have less access to land, technology, financial services, education and markets than men; fewer than 20 percent of the world’s landowners are women, and female farmers receive only 5 percent of extension services globally. FSIL’s focus on food safety gaps in perishable, nutritious foods — including dairy, poultry, fish, and produce — also provides an opportunity to address the gender gap. Too often, gender is incorporated into research for development only by disaggregating data and indicators by gender or holding trainings for women. This is a great start, but it is unlikely to be transformative.

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Aditya Khanal originally hails from a pocket of Nepal where citrus — in particular, mandarins and sweet oranges — grew plentifully. As a young boy on his grandfather’s farm, he remembers the local producers having a surplus of fruit but lacking the proper channels to sell it outside their small village.

Witnessing as a child that lost earning potential and its repercussions for the farmers’ families had a lasting effect on him. It was then that Khanal first recognized the importance of market connections in the world of agriculture. Today, he works as an agricultural and applied economist who studies the complex interplay between producers and consumers.

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Those of us at the consumer end of the food production chain don’t necessarily think about food safety much. Sure, we know to cook chicken thoroughly and never let potato salad sit out too long in the heat. We read the occasional news story about a foodborne illness outbreak and remind ourselves to wash our lettuce and scrub our cantaloupes extra carefully.

But the overall, exceptional safety of our food supply comes thanks to hard work, research, data analysis, education and outreach by people all along the food production chain. At Purdue, food safety researchers are deeply involved in this process at every step. Their work helps ensure that the chicken on our plates, the herbs in our spice racks and the milk in our children’s glasses won’t make us sick.

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Categorizing Purdue University animal science graduate student Leah Thompson is a challenging proposition.

“I joke that I’m grossly mislabeled, because I’m an animal scientist working on a project in Cambodia that is all about vegetables,” she says.

Furthermore, her role in that project largely focuses on understanding women’s roles, knowledge and attitudes about food safety. This pivot was spurred by an offer from Purdue Professor of Animal Sciences—and her former undergraduate advisor—Paul Ebner to return to Purdue to pursue a Ph.D. focused on international food safety research and outreach. Ebner had recently been named co-Principal Investigator (PI) on a project funded by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety (FSIL) to reduce foodborne illness spread by vegetables sold through traditional markets in Cambodia.

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When Purdue professor of animal sciences, Paul Ebner, reviews data from his team’s surveys of food safety knowledge and attitudes in Cambodia, his first priority is using the results to develop effective food safety outreach activities for vegetable farmers, distributors, and vendors. However, because his project is supported by federal funding, he is also required to comply with mandates for open and accessible data. These federal directives aim to provide evidence for scientists and decision-makers around the world and fuel entrepreneurship, innovation and scientific discovery.

Ebner’s project is one of six supported by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety (FSIL), based at Purdue University and Cornell University. Funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the projects address policies and practices to reduce the burden of foodborne disease and malnutrition in target Feed the Future countries.

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In Cambodia, a multinational research team has piloted a leadership and food safety workshop that empowers female farmers to collaborate and take collective action to strengthen food safety in their communities.

In August, two dozen female vegetable farmers and staff members from Banteay Srei, a local nonprofit focused on women’s self-empowerment, participated in trainings held in the Cambodian provinces of Siem Reap and Battambang. During the day-long workshops, women worked together to identify their personal strengths and conduct risk assessments of the vegetable value chain, learning how their leadership and collective action can improve food safety in their communities.

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An international, multidisciplinary research team has launched a new project to improve the safety of fresh produce in Nepal by harnessing market-based approaches that integrate consumer and producer studies.

With a policy focus that prioritized food security and government investments in related areas, Nepal has experienced relatively higher productivity of some agricultural crops and lower poverty rates. Yet, 36% of children under five years old are chronically malnourished, and food production is only one side of the equation, says Aditya Khanal, associate professor of agricultural economics at Tennessee State University (TSU) and principal investigator (PI) on the new study funded by FSIL.

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While he now calls the state of Texas home, Madan Dey has roots in rural Bangladesh, where he grew up on the family farm. It was a small-scale operation that mainly produced rice, along with some fish and dairy. As a young boy, he witnessed firsthand his father, uncle and other relatives navigate the many challenges of running an agricultural business.

Today, as an agricultural economist, he performs experiments and analyses to better understand consumer behavior, which at first glance seems far removed from farming life. Yet, the heart of Dey’s work — to improve the livelihood of farmers around the world — can be traced back to his upbringing.

“I don’t like to do research for the sake of research. I like to do research that will help the stakeholder,” says Dey, professor of agricultural business and economics and chair of the Department of Agricultural Sciences at Texas State University. “I know the real pain of farming, so I try to help farmers.”

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Progress in food safety can stumble in the final mile: innovations to reduce the risk of foodborne illness are only effective if people are willing and able to adopt them. Social science tools can help fill this “implementation gap,” enabling researchers to understand the incentives and barriers to the adoption of new food safety practices. A recent course on research methods for gender-sensitive surveys, interviews and focus groups has equipped a cohort in Cambodia to help bridge the implementation gap in a vegetable food safety project funded by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety.

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Poultry production systems worldwide are vulnerable to contamination with bacterial pathogens, such as non-typhoidal Salmonella, which is the leading cause of death from foodborne disease in Africa. Research grounded in locally led decision-making about priorities will be better positioned to generate sustainable, scalable food safety solutions. Leveraging this approach, a team of Kenya- and U.S.-based researchers held a risk ranking workshop in March, engaging female smallholder farmers in Kenya in prioritizing food safety interventions for rigorous evaluation.

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