We build institutions to coordinate. Then we forget we built them.
I have spent thirty years in food safety and regulatory science — at the European Commission, in industry, in standards development, and at the United Nations. My work is about how institutions decide what counts as safe, who gets a say in that decision, and what it takes for the answer to be trusted.
What I work on
Food safety and regulatory science
Scientific advice, risk assessment, and the governance of international food standards — how evidence becomes a rule that ninety countries can act on.
Standards and who they exclude
Standards coordinate, and they also exclude. I work on what an inclusive alternative to pass-or-fail food safety would have to look like.
Trust and institutions
Safe food is a delegated judgment. That makes it a trust problem before it is a technical one — and institutions are unusually bad at trust.
Recent work
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Artificial intelligence in food safety
Contributing to FAO's work on how AI is entering food safety management, and on the governance questions that arrive with it.
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Food safety foresight
FAO's flagship work on the drivers likely to reshape food safety over the coming decades.
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Scientific advice to Codex Alimentarius
Independent chemical and microbiological risk assessment through the joint FAO/WHO expert bodies, underpinning international food standards.
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Speaking and media
UN briefings, World Food Safety Day, the International Heads of Food Agencies Forum, and press, radio and television on food safety and food fraud.
Writing
I am completing a book on how humans build institutions, forget that they built them, and then live inside the result — and on what compassion grounded in constraint might offer as a way through. Essays and notes appear here.