Navigating Food Safety and Antimicrobial Resistance

In this episode of Coffee in the Barn, Casey Bradley welcomes Dr. Christine Alvarado, a poultry scientist and food safety expert, for a deep dive into food safety, antimicrobial resistance (AMR), and the need for clear communication within the food industry. Dr. Alvarado shares insights on the importance of educating consumers with facts over soundbites, addressing the critical role of recalls, and debunking common misconceptions around food safety and AMR. She emphasizes the value of transparency with consumers, explains how recalls contribute positively to food quality assurance, and advocates for reintroducing agriculture education to strengthen public understanding of food safety. 

Highlights from the Conversation: 

• Supporting Women in the Meat Industry 
  Dr. Alvarado talks about her involvement in the Women in Meat Industry Network (WMIN), which provides mentorship and resources to support women’s careers in the meat and poultry sectors. 
• Understanding Antimicrobial Resistance in Food Safety 
  Dr. Alvarado explains the complexities of AMR, how it naturally occurs, and why data-driven decisions in food production are essential to managing it responsibly. 
• The Role of Recalls in Consumer Protection 
  She clarifies that recalls can be a proactive part of quality assurance, ensuring products meet safety standards and protect consumers, contrary to negative perceptions. 
• The Power of Transparency with Consumers 
  Dr. Alvarado highlights the need for open, clear communication around food safety to build trust with consumers and combat misinformation. 
• Bringing Agriculture Back to Education 
  As a strong advocate for K-12 agriculture and home economics education, Dr. Alvarado believes these subjects are essential to improving food safety understanding and self-sufficiency in future generations. 

Tune into this insightful episode for a clearer understanding of food safety practices, consumer transparency, and the shared responsibility of producers and consumers in upholding quality and safety standards. 

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Chapters

• 0:52 Introduction and Career Journey of Dr. Christine Alvarado
• 2:34 Women in the Meat and Poultry Industry: Supporting Future Leaders
• 7:50 Food Safety, Antimicrobial Resistance, and Industry Innovations
• 16:45 Communicating Food Recalls and Building Consumer Trust

Transcript

Casey Bradley 
0:00:52 
Well, hello and welcome to Coffee in the Barn this week with my good friend, Dr. Christine Alvarado. Christine, I know things have changed for you recently, so I'd love you to introduce yourself to the audience and give a little bit of background of your career and kind of where you're at today with all of it. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:01:03 
Okay, sounds good. Thanks for having me on, Casey, I appreciate it. So, just a quick background on myself. I am a poultry scientist and food scientist, did all my degrees at Texas A&M University, and then jumped into being a professor for 20 years. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:01:21 
I was at Virginia Tech, Texas Tech, and Texas A&M. And so got a really good background from, you know, scientific method regarding both food safety and also meat quality. Poultry is my background, and I have a strong love for poultry, 

Christine Alvarado 
0:01:37 
but I have dabbled into some of the other meats as well too. From there, I jumped to FSIS for a couple of years and was in policy development there and then decided to go a little bit more in the allied industry. I also worked for a poultry company for a while in quality assurance, quality control. And then, as I said, decided to jump out into the allied industry. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:02:02 
So for the past few years, I've been really focusing on food safety, ingredients and interventions, and also ingredients for improved meat quality. And as of last week, I worked for Dr. G's. So they are also an ingredient company, 

Christine Alvarado 
0:02:21 
marination and batter breading specifically. And so I've been there for a few days and absolutely loving my career and loving the path that it's taking me on. 

Casey Bradley 
0:02:33 
Well, awesome. And we met because of some of our similar goals and outreach and supporting women. Can you tell us a little bit about the program that you started with a few other amazing women in the meat and poultry industry? 

Christine Alvarado 
0:02:50 
Yeah. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:02:51 
So, and which, sorry to ask this question, but which program do you want me to talk about specifically? 

Casey Bradley 
0:02:58 
The women and meat. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:03:01 
Women and meat. Yeah. Okay. Good. I just wanted to make sure because there was, there were several things that I've been involved in the last couple of years. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:03:07 
I wanted to make sure I was heading down the right direction. 

Casey Bradley 
0:03:10 
I couldn't remember the exact name. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:03:13 
So, yeah. Yeah. W, yeah. No, it's perfect. WMIN is the are the initials for it. So, for those of you out there that are in the in the meat industry, it is not only for women. So don't think that you can't join if you're not a woman. But anyway, we kind of it's been a really interesting, 

Christine Alvarado 
0:03:34 
I guess, progression. I think there's been a lot of informal ways of supporting each other in the industry. You know, the poultry industry, the meat industry, it's normally been male-dominated industry. And I will say that that is continually evolving and continually changing. For example, at Dr. G's, we are a C-suite of predominantly women. So that's been a really interesting, you know, week of work. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:04:05 
It's been really fun actually. It's the first time I'm ever involved in anything like that. But going back to WMIN, so it was originally started as just a way to support women in the industry, especially women that are kind of getting into the industry, 

Christine Alvarado 
0:04:21 
recently graduated or recently come into the industry, maybe even from a different industry. And so, it's just a way to formalize some of the networks that we, I guess, have been doing for a long time and just getting it actually set into an organization. And so, some of the great things about that is that they do a lot of podcasts, they do mentorship programs that was recently launched. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:04:49 
And so, if anyone is interested in joining that, just go to the website and sign up to be either a mentor or a mentee. And just providing a little bit more structure to give support to those new folks coming in. And it's things like, you know, how do you negotiate or how do you ask for maybe, you know, a different type of position within your company, whether it's moving up or even moving to a different area. How do you navigate things like maternity leave, right? Which are things that people have a lot of experience with, 

Christine Alvarado 
0:05:25 
but we've never been in a way that we can formalize talking about it and having a place for people to come ask questions about how did you handle this? Or what did you do with this? Or how did you navigate coming back 

Christine Alvarado 
0:05:37 
to the workforce with a newborn? I mean, those are all real, really relevant things and becoming more relevant as we start seeing a lot more women coming into our industries. 

Casey Bradley 
0:05:47 
So, a very similar platform to what we're trying to also create here a little bit on Coffee in the Barn and talking about, you know, both science and work life, right? Because it's both that we have to balance and help get our message out in agriculture and the food industry. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:05:58 
Yeah, I can, I'm just going to interject something here because I wrote a blog about this not too long ago, but I really hate the word balance because I don't ever think we're ever in balance. And when I think about balance, I think of like a post-it ball or something, you know, something like that, where you're trying to, you know, you're either leaning to the left or leaning to the right, it's either work or it's family, 

Christine Alvarado 
0:06:30 
and you're always trying to navigate that balance. And it's really, really, really hard to do. Even folks with a lot of experience and folks that have been trying to do that for a long time, it's really, really difficult to do. So I like to use the word harmony, 

Christine Alvarado 
0:06:46 
just because to me it makes it a little bit easier to try to figure out harmony between work and life instead of trying to balance the two because one of them are always going to be out of balance. There's times, you know, where work is going to take a priority. There's times where family is going to take a priority. There's time where you're actually going to split between those two. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:07:03 
And so I like to maybe redefine that phrase and try to use a little bit more of the term harmony. I know in my mind it makes it a little bit easier to handle than trying to figure out a way to balance. 

Casey Bradley 
0:07:19 
No, I agree. And I think more and more women are speaking out about that as well. And I speak out about that. It's not really balance. It's what you need to get done today. And, yeah, your life stage. Right. And there are some people who make it look easy, but it's probably not. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:07:29 
No, it's not. And we all have that guilt associated with that, right? And so to me, harmony takes the guilt out. Maybe it's just wording for me, but it sure makes it a little bit easier. 

Casey Bradley 
0:07:46 
Yeah. Well, awesome. This month, we wanted to bring on a food safety specialist, and that's you. You go around and teach all these awesome food safety programs. I see you doing tons on it. And we're looking at this month at antimicrobial resistance. And we obviously talked about from a veterinarian perspective with Dr. Michelle Kromm. And now it's really getting down to food safety. And I just attended two pet events this month, actually, or in October. So you guys are listening in November. But food safety and recalls have been a discussion point for me. 

Casey Bradley 
0:08:29 
And then the recent thing with McDonald's and the bad onions on the quarter pounders, where does the industry from the live production to the food side kind of walk us through how we can help prevent, you know, antimicrobial resistance, but keep safe food for humans? 

Christine Alvarado 
0:08:48 
Right. Yeah. So, this is a great question and it's an ever-evolving field. So, you know, a couple of years from now we might be having a different discussion as new technologies develop and so forth. But first of all, I'm going to say, and I'm going to speak specifically about the poultry 

Christine Alvarado 
0:09:05 
industry, but this can be applied to others as well. You know, we've done an amazing job with keeping food safe. We've evolved since I first started in this industry, you know, beginning of HACCP is when I first started. So we've really done a great job in knowing what goes on in our production 

Christine Alvarado 
0:09:26 
and processing areas and mitigating risks and understanding what technologies are out there to reduce the risk of foodborne pathogens. So first I wanna say that because we always hear about outbreaks, you know, in the news, and, but we never ever, ever hear about the 99% of the rest of the time 

Christine Alvarado 
0:09:46 
that we do an amazing job. So, I just want to highlight that the industry is very forthcoming and is very focused on preventing risks. What I can say is that in raw agricultural products, we are going to have issues of concern. We're going to have, you know, in poultry specifically salmonella. And antimicrobial resistance can happen anywhere. It doesn't necessarily have to be, you know, an antimicrobial or a pH change or anything like that that occurs during the processing system to create antimicrobial resistance, it can happen in nature. Any kind of external force against that 

Christine Alvarado 
0:10:29 
bacteria can create antimicrobial resistance. So I wanted to throw those two things out just to make sure, you know, everyone's aware that this is something that nature takes care of a lot of times. But from a production and processing standpoint, I think the biggest thing to know is we have methods of determining serovars, virulence factors, antimicrobial resistance, and a lot of information about bacteria that is at the production facility, that's coming into our processing plant, that's moving through the system, and that's getting into the final package. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:11:10 
The thing to note is that those are all a little bit different. For example, we may have anti-microbials that can be used out in live production and can decrease the risk associated with that. However, once we get into the processing plant and we begin to go through evisceration, we begin to go through cut up, we begin to do all those processes to turn that animal into an edible type product, into meat, muscle into meat. We start exposing things like ear sacs, we start exposing things like bone marrow, and 

Christine Alvarado 
0:11:52 
some of these salmonella can become intrinsic in the bird, they can become systemic in the bird. And so, we did a study, oh my gosh, I feel like it's been forever ago, but we did a study with ARA in combination with Texas A&M University and really kind of looked at that and found that some of these serovars 

Christine Alvarado 
0:12:14 
can become systemic really do end up getting through the system through, you know, cutting open the bird and through the air sacs and through the bone marrow and that. And because we now know that information, there's targeted areas that processors can take to apply certain antimicrobials or processes, right, to reduce and mitigate that risk. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:12:39 
So I guess my point is over all of this is that we now know a lot more about each of these serovars and about each of these bacteria, specifically salmonella mainly, but also campylobacter in poultry to identify the risks at live production for high virulence, high microbial resistant bacteria, as well as that moving through the system to processing. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:13:04 
And because of that, all the establishments know what those risks are and what bacteria and cerevars that they're working with and what the qualities of those cerevars are. And so, because of that, we are better able to target interventions and to reduce that risk for consumers. 

Casey Bradley 
0:13:23 
Well, wow, that's awesome. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:13:24 
Yeah. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:13:25 
That was a big mouthful. Sorry. Yeah, I know. 

Casey Bradley 
0:13:28 
I was like, I'm not going to say it. 

Casey Bradley 
0:13:29 
Okay. That is awesome. That's exactly what we wanted to cover in five questions. But really, I think you made a good point in the beginning of that is that there's been this misconception out in the industry that recalls are bad, where a lot of those recalls happening more on the pet food space has actually been good because the animal haven't been 

Casey Bradley 
0:14:00 
infected with it, they've recalled it and found it before it impacted the consumer. And we're seeing that a lot in these recalls. So, I mean, the media makes it sound so bad, but they're actually a really good component of our quality assurance and quality control process. You know, obviously, the McDonald's one was kind of a sad one, but recalls are kind of good in my mind, and that walks us into the role of quality assurance in the prevention. 

Casey Bradley 
0:14:35 
As you said, you went through all those processes about controlling pathogens, but also ensuring antimicrobial resistance. When you hear that, a lot of the general consumers or people will think antibiotics, but it's really more than just antibiotics that these bugs can learn to evade. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:14:53 
Right, true. And I mean, also think about that human component too, right? Like we don't use anti, not antimicrobials, we don't use antibiotics, sorry. We don't use antibiotics 

Christine Alvarado 
0:15:06 
with human medicine and animals, right? So there's a huge component of also antimicrobial resistance that can occur also from misused prescriptions, right? And so, it's multiple factors involved. It's not just animal agriculture is bad because we do X, Y, Z. It's really more complex and more complicated than that per se. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:15:30 
What I will say is that, going back to the recall issue, not issue, but discussion, is that you never want to have a recall, period, as an establishment. You never, ever want to have a recall. But recalls are there and tracing and traceability are there, even things from like, are there to help minimize and mitigate risk, right? Yes, recall is a method to use to prevent bad things from happening. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:16:00 
We never really ever want to get there. But at the same time, recalls have worked. And they have... And think about what we consider to be in commerce can mean it's sitting on somebody's back dock. So, there have been recalls that have occurred where it's never really left the establishment 

Christine Alvarado 
0:16:20 
per se. It's left it on paper, but it has not entered into commerce to cause any harm to people. So, when you read about a recall, you know, you can always find out more information about it, and I encourage people to do that as well. But just because you hear a recall has happened does not mean that in all cases that it can create a risk for consumers. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:16:51 
So, and recall methodologies do work, and that's why even things from a retail grocery store, you know, using your Kroger card or whatever card that you have, right, that can tie what you've purchased, all of that is part of the system to help mitigate risks. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:17:05 
So there's a lot of things put into place to minimize that. 

Casey Bradley 
0:17:09 
Well, and I agree. 

Casey Bradley 
0:17:11 
So how do we talk about that? Because obviously I hate to keep bringing up the McDonald's one that's the most recent one in the news. And they said the quarter pounder and they're like, Oh, the beef is going to kill the beef industry. And then, you know, you read more into it and investigate more and you know, it's the onion slivers. But how do we talk to our consumers? How do we get that message out when a recall happens because it's a massive brand hit. I mean, we look at the Boar's Head, we look at, you know, Blue Buffalo on the pet food side and different things 

Casey Bradley 
0:17:49 
on recalls in the past. Just some of them that I've been aware of and they can really hammer brand reputation and stuff. So how do we talk about that to our consumers when recalls happen. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:18:02 
Yeah, and that's a tough one, to be honest with you. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:18:08 
It's... 

Christine Alvarado 
0:18:09 
And so, back up one second, because I've been traveling on a plane, I've been traveling this week, so I'm teaching an industry class, so it's been kind of a crazy week. Did they say that it was the onions then? I have not read further. I heard about the outbreak, heard about the quarter pounder, but I did not look into any more of that. 

Casey Bradley 
0:18:30 
Sorry. And I was here, I'm spreading rumors that it's the onions and not the beef. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:18:34 
No, no, no. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:18:35 
I knew that they were looking at the onions. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:18:36 
Yeah. 

Casey Bradley 
0:18:37 
Yes. 

Casey Bradley 
0:18:38 
Yes. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:18:39 
I came up last yesterday and I have not confirmed the final report yet. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:18:42 
Okay. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:18:43 
You're way ahead of me. I did not hear any of that. It's a hard one, especially when people are affected and illnesses occur and deaths occur, I mean, that's, you know, you never ever want to see that happen. And so, talking about risk and food supplies, it's really hard to discuss with consumers. But what I will say is that there's ways you can be up to date with recalls if consumers are concerned about that. There's ways that, you know, reading the news and there's ways that you can get recall information. But I think most importantly is that we understand as consumers that 

Christine Alvarado 
0:19:32 
the industry is doing everything that they can to minimize that risk and to get people a safe food supply. Like that is people's job, right? Is to make sure that that risk is minimal, to make sure that people have good quality food that is safe to eat, that you can feed your family. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:19:53 
And like percentage wise, I don't know, but I'm gonna throw out the 99% of the time, everything goes very, very smoothly. And when we do have those recalls, sometimes it's multiple breaks in the system, right? And that's where continuous improvement comes in. But I think the worst thing that we can do is, one, spread rumors. Two, try to discern what happens and try to figure out 

Christine Alvarado 
0:20:19 
and create fear in consumers when we don't have that final, this is what happened, this is how it happened, and this is why it happened. And that takes a while, and so it requires patience of all of us to do. But I think the worst thing that we can do as an industry is make assumptions, spread rumors, and then create fear. And that's what I wish that we could minimize with media, because I get letting people know information, but information is different than spreading rumors and creating fear, right, or making assumptions on things. And so a lot of times that happens 

Christine Alvarado 
0:21:01 
in media while we're trying to get the word out and I wish that we could do a better job of that. Sometimes it does create a lot of unnecessary fear. Like I said, it's unnecessary to create that with consumers. The other thing is, you know, brand recognition. I mean, let's just look at what happened with Blue Bell. I mean, I'm from Texas and, you know, there was a listeria outbreak, but people were like really mad that there was no real Blue Bell in that freezer. And when they finally got it in there, there were lines out the door, right? 

Christine Alvarado 
0:21:43 
So I think that people are tied to brands. And I think that there is a lot of brand loyalty, but I think it's, you know, how we present information to that consumer through the media. And that's what I wish that we would control. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:22:01 
Because I do believe that there is brand loyalty with products with consumers. 

Casey Bradley 
0:22:07 
Now, I love all that. And I knew you were going to teach me on the McDonald's thing until I have the full facts. It's so crushed in my mind. But people will be listening to it, and there may be facts out there that we have a final ruling. But I just always think of how do we communicate this? And then, yeah. 

Casey Bradley 
0:22:29 
And then, how do we bring it together? You're closer to the consumer than the producers. And we all have our role to play in food safety. And we have to say that the U.S., regardless of what people think, we have probably the number one food safety 

Casey Bradley 
0:22:47 
in the world still today, through all the different programs we have done. HACCP's been a great addition to our food safety program, but you know I hear more often things going wrong from buying local eggs or people not trusting our food chain to be safe so they're gonna raise their own food and then my friend's an inspector in Kansas and she sends me some pictures of livers of these animals that haven't been dewormed and things like that that she's got to condemn because 

Casey Bradley 
0:23:22 
... But there's that mindset that big food's not safe, but my little homegrown animal is safer for me. And it actually, we all need to do our part in the foods plane, even the consumers of storing our food properly to cooking it. And just kind of, I think getting that message out that... 

Christine Alvarado 
0:23:45 
Yeah, a hundred percent. And I'm getting agitated if you can see me, I'm moving around in my chair because this is my soapbox. I mean, girl, this is my soapbox. We took home ec and ag out of the classroom, what, I can't, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, I don't know, I'm kind 

Christine Alvarado 
0:24:05 
of old. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:24:06 
We took it out a long time ago. And that was our connection, right? We need to put that back in the classroom. And I get we have all of these requirements from education, you know, at the state level, I get that, but the state level is so far removed from agriculture. The state level is so far removed from production, animal agriculture, and growing crops, and you know, they're so far removed as well. And so, we have 

Christine Alvarado 
0:24:36 
got to make a change in our education system because the only way we're going to make a change in society is K through 12. When you get to be my age, sometimes those habits are hard to change and people go, oh, that's never happened to me. I'll be fine, you know? And three days later, they get a stomach bug, right? From something that they ate from their backyard 

Christine Alvarado 
0:25:00 
or whatever, maybe it was eggs or, you know, raw milk or who knows what it was because they don't trust big animal ag. And so I really think that's gonna be where we need to make the changes is in that K-12 and putting that ag back in the classroom, whether it be a home ec class, you know, or just any kind of agricultural production 

Christine Alvarado 
0:25:22 
class where we really talk about these things. And that is going to be the change that we need to see for the future generations. So, I have a huge soapbox on that. If I could get to every state capitol and stand on the steps and petition for that. That's what I would be at the for education, because we really are doing everyone a disservice. 

Casey Bradley 
0:25:45 
Well, definitely, there's a lot less life school skills being taught in general. Parents don't take that time. You know, I remember even just learning to change a tire. I hated doing it, but I learned how to do it. But we look at that so disconnected and our screens and there's so much disinformation and so-called 

Casey Bradley 
0:26:07 
influencers who are even experts on how to raise pigs and then I make a comment as a professional PhD and I always have to put a tagline in there, 'I'm not a veterinarian. So seek veterinarian advice. Well, we don't offer veterinarian advice here'.' But I said, being a PhD, I legally have to state that because I'm not a veterinarian talking about a health challenge. 

Casey Bradley 
0:26:39 
And it's just everybody thinks they're the expert and yet they don't ask the right advice. And I thought it was really interesting and so off the mark, I think, was at KibbleCon, and they said that most people get dietary advice from their pets. So, this is assuming that dietary advice for themselves would come from their doctors. But they get it from their veterinarian, and I don't... I'm not sure they've gone through. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:27:05 
Yeah, so, you know, even human doctors, you know, they're not nutritionists. Dietitians. You're supposed to call them dieticians. So, they're not dieticians, right? And so, we really have to, we've become so specialized in our society, which is amazing 

Christine Alvarado 
0:27:21 
because we, like I said, we now know virulence factors. We now know all this stuff, you know, on a microbial level that we can now go in and fix and change and do. But that also requires maybe multiple people helping us through our lives with pets, with our own nutritional advice, our own physician physical advice. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:27:46 
And so it requires kind of multiple people. And there's not a one-stop shop. Like I'm a poultry scientist, I'm not an accountant. So my specialty is that, and before we used to have multiple specialties across the board. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:27:58 
And I wish that we could teach that to the younger generation, because I really think that that's going to be the change that occurs, that we need to occur as we go through this. And one more thing I was going to say about the safest supply in the world, which I do believe that we have. Most, in fact, I'm going to say, I'll say most all just in case I don't know 100%, but most all export, you know, certifications, how you approve exports 

Christine Alvarado 
0:28:31 
from a food safety standpoint are based on USA regulations. And so, we have a really good CDC, we have a really good USDA, FSIS, we have a really good FDA, and they actually work together to make sure that we are mitigating risk and creating a safe food supply. A lot of other countries don't have that same system set up. And so they may look safer on paper, but that means that may mean that they're not tracking 

Christine Alvarado 
0:29:01 
and tracing like we do. And so just because our numbers may be higher than some other countries doesn't mean that we're worse off than them. So you really have to look into the how and the why. 

Casey Bradley 
0:29:12 
Well that is really great. Before we go, I think this kind of wraps up a full circle because you and I can talk for 

Casey Bradley 
0:29:21 
hours. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:29:22 
I know. Nobody wants to listen to that. 

Casey Bradley 
0:29:23 
Is there any last parting wisdom that you have for the audience based on what we've all talked about on this episode? 

Christine Alvarado 
0:29:34 
I just kind of want to leave everybody on a positive note, you know. I think there's a lot of misinformation out there. There's, you know, from people that may not be experts in the area. And so, I did, I was telling you earlier before the podcast that we did a Science Over Soundbites Discussion, a friend of mine and I did. And really, you know, find, if you see something on TikTok that may not be 

Christine Alvarado 
0:30:08 
experts at speaking, and so really, I mean, we've got all kinds of information at our fingertips, and so take five minutes and really figure out if what's being said is the truth or if there's, you know, if it's not true, period. So, I guess I just encourage everybody to really look at sources and resources to find out the right information. And with that said, I think that, I mean, I'm really glad to be working in our industry. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:30:38 
I think we have come a long way from when I first started 30 plus, or 30 years ago. I'm excited about all the good things and changes that we've made to mitigate risk and to make food safe and also to include high quality in that. Because sometimes, you know, we can focus a lot on the safety and forget about the quality. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:31:03 
And I think our industry has really done a great job of meshing those two things together to provide people with safe and wholesome food. And so I get excited about that. I get excited about my career and working in the industry. And I just want other people to know 

Christine Alvarado 
0:31:19 
that we're doing the right things to make sure that you and your family stay safe 

Christine Alvarado 
0:31:25 
and have good food to eat. 

Casey Bradley 
0:31:27 
Well, I am glad you left it at that because I think that's a perfect ending that we're all doing the best we can. And that's why I wanted to have you on to talk about both AMR, food safety and the One Health, right? Because we talked about people, animals, and plants, but really food safety brings all 

Casey Bradley 
0:31:45 
that together also as well. So thank you so much, Christine, for being here. 

Christine Alvarado 
0:31:50 
Yeah, thanks for having me. It was great. I appreciate it.