Food defense

Food defense is the protection of food products from intentional contamination or adulteration by biological, chemical, physical, or radiological agents. It addresses additional concerns including physical, personnel and operational security. This is in contrast to food safety, which is based on accidental or environmental contamination, and food security, which deals with individuals having access to enough food for an active, healthy life. These three terms are often conflated. Food protection is the umbrella term encompassing both food defense and food safety.

Along with protecting the food system, food defense also deals with prevention, protection, mitigation, response and recovery from intentional acts of adulteration.

Food defense events can generally be categorized into three types. These could be carried out by a disgruntled employee, sophisticated insider, or intelligent adversary with a specific goal in mind. This goal may be to impact the public, brand, company or the psycho-social stability of a group of people depending on the type. However an event may contain aspects of more than one category.

These events include intentional contamination by a disgruntled employee, insider or competitor with the intention of damaging the brand of the company, causing financial problems from a widespread recall or sabotage, but not necessarily with the goal of causing widespread illness or public harm. These internal actors often know what procedures are followed in the plant, and how to bypass checkpoints and security controls.

An example of a disgruntled employee is the contamination of frozen foods produced by a subsidiary of Maruha Nichiro Holdings with malathion, a pesticide. The contamination is speculated to have occurred because the employee was dissatisfied with pay and benefits. The contamination resulted in a recall of 6.4 million potentially tainted products. Nearly 1,800 people are estimated to have been affected, and public confidence in food quality was shaken.

The reach and complexity of the food system has caused concern for its potential as a terrorist target.

The first and largest food attack in the US is the 1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack. 751 individuals were poisoned in The Dalles, Oregon through the contamination of salad bars with Salmonella with the intention of affecting the 1984 Wasco County elections.

The FDA's working definition of EMA is

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