COVID-19 Could Usher in an Even Cleaner, Safer Food Supply

My grandmother had one of the cleanest houses on the planet. She scrubbed every day for hours. Until COVID-19 I never understood why she and other people of her generation spent so much time and effort cleaning their homes to such an exacting degree. Turns out that in the early 20th century, with the Spanish flu pandemic raging across the globe, people changed the way they lived and obsessive cleaning became a required behavior.

A wave of the Spanish flu brought Boston to its knees in the summer of 1918. It started among sailors at the Commonwealth Pier in Boston Harbor and within 24 weeks, the epidemic went on to infect more than 25 million Americans. Six hundred and seventy-five thousand perished. My grandmother lived barely a mile from this infamous pier and remarkably stayed healthy.

A century later we’re hand-washing and disinfecting surfaces all over again in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. I predict this new emphasis on hygiene, cleanliness and personal safety will be with us for decades to come. Some countries — most notably Japan — adopted these hygiene protocols years ago. Point your nose to Japanese sidewalks and roadways and you won’t find a shred of paper. Restaurants, food stores, hotels and train stations: all are pristine clean. Exemplars of this cleanliness are the women in pink at train stations. They wield their tiny brushes (think of a toothbrush), making sure every inch of every surface is scrubbed so that not one bit of dirt remains.

Across the globe, COVID-19 has us cleaning like our foremothers during the Spanish flu. Who can’t appreciate subways and train cars that are scrubbed clean and disinfected multiple times a day?

My interest in cleanliness, in particular safe food, started when I was a child. I saw my entrepreneurial family engage in safe food practices, starting with my grandmother’s cleanliness routines and my grandfather’s emphasis on purity, quality and safety in his food brokerage business.

He started the business at the turn of the century near the world-famous Haymarket Square in Boston, and supplied New England with safe food for decades. It made an impression on my young mind and motivated me as an adult to lead efforts towards enhancing the quality and safety of food.

For more than 20 years I was privileged to lead a company that reaches across 100 countries, and positively impacts the lives of millions by protecting and enhancing the global food supply. The firm does this through providing tests for naturally-occurring contaminants in a variety of foods. The increased presence and levels of these contaminants, also known as mycotoxins, have been exacerbated by climate change.

With the renewed emphasis on cleanliness, the safety and quality of local and global food supplies and soils will be in the spotlight. We’ll see an increased focus on product quality versus cost, where consumers are more quality-oriented than price conscious. It may come as a surprise that only an extremely small percentage of food is tested in the U.S and around the world. In this COVID and post-COVID world, more food supplies and their environments will inevitably and increasingly be tested for safety and quality. With humans living in closer proximity to wild animals and natural habitat under continual degradation, it’s inevitable that there will be more pathogens transferred from animals to humans, causing more frequent pandemics. I can’t emphasize enough that better cleaning and food testing will help keep deadly pathogens and toxins at bay.

Consumers are becoming more educated and will demand more from our leaders when it comes to the safety of our environment and the local and global food supplies. Both environmental and food safety regulations have been gaining global traction and will likely accelerate in the years ahead, as a result of COVID-19.

It’s one silver lining to come out of an extremely challenging time for us all. If my grandmother had lived through the COVID-19 pandemic, I have no doubt the recommended hand-washing and surface disinfecting would have successfully met each one of her exacting standards of cleanliness.