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<< back to the 1999 archive listing << Dairy, Food and Environmental Sanitation Quotations From Jack, September 1999 Change is something we deal with every day of our lives By the time you read this column, the Annual Meeting will be over and along with it the business meeting vote on the proposed new constitution, including the name change for our Association. Assuming the Members in attendance at the business meeting voted to approve the changes, ballots will be in the mail to you for the Membership vote on the changes. Soon you will be making your decision about the changes. Change is something we deal with every day of our lives. Think of the changes you have experienced from your childhood through your school and college days to marriage and a family. That's a lot of change that we see as a natural evolution over time. Then there is the change we experience in our careers. Think of the evolution of the information age from typewriters and regular mail to computers, photocopiers, fax and E-mail. And how about the changes in the food industry over the years such as transportation allowing fresh produce to be available 12 months of the year in northern climates and the explosion of new products that enter the market each year. Members of this organization have no trouble thinking of the many changes that have occurred in food safety in recent years with emerging pathogens and movement from command and control regulations to HACCP to address those challenges. Some of us see these changes as threats, others as opportunities. Some of these changes seem to occur as evolutionary processes while others seem much more like revolutions. No matter how you view change there is one thing for sure, it will continue to occur. IAMFES has changed over the years. We have grown from an organization with a focus on milk safety to one that is concerned with microbial safety of all food products. We have developed a close working relationship with the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) and hosted several of their excellent symposia at our Annual Meeting as well as published proceedings of those symposia in our Journal of Food Protection. The scope and volume of articles in our Journals have grown, as has the size of our Annual Meeting. In other words we are not the same organization today that we were 20 or 40 years ago and there is every reason to believe that we will be a very different organization in another 20 years. So we need to step back and look at ourselves, define who we are today and where we see our organization going. I think the most telling view of who we are comes from reading the responses to the Member survey we conducted last fall. (The survey has been summarized in past DFES columns and a summary can be obtained by contacting the Des Moines office.) Most of our Members identify with our organization and our mission, but not with our name. This confusion is holding us back among our Members and with many prospective Members who don't see who we are today in what we call ourselves. Some people feel that a name change means cutting us off from our history or from who we used to be. I can understand that feeling as I share some of it and have given this concern a great deal of thought. I am very proud to call myself a sanitarian. I have been one for almost 30 years. I am very proud of the history of this organization and the contribution this organization has made to the field of milk safety in particular. I am concerned that many of our Members are unaware of our history and therefore can not appreciate how truly historic a contribution our Association made to milk safety in the first half of this century. Specifically I am referring to the push for milk pasteurization, which most of our Members no doubt take for granted today. It is for these reasons that I am issuing a call for Members to come forward who are willing to develop a written history of our organization. The turn of the century is a good time to undertake such a project. This can be done by reviewing our records and past publications stored in our office in Des Moines as well as those that may exist in university or private collections, not to mention the vast store of history in the minds of our long-standing Members. I would hope that this history can be shared with our Members as a series of articles we would publish in DFES in coming months. Perhaps we can have a paper or two about our history presented at next year's Annual Meeting. Please contact David Tharp or myself if you would like to work on such a project in any capacity. So now it is time to wrap up with a request that you support our name change as recognition of the organization we have been in the past, for who we are today, and for who we hope to be in the future. |