It always intrigues me when folks come before us. Everyone talks about a science-based food safety system and everyone leans on HACCP in a lot of ways, in the sense of that being...I don't want to call it the crutch, but it seems to be the support mechanism by which they say this is a science-based system.
We had a witness here last week who talked about systems and systems analysis. In fact, that's what he did for a living for a long time. He was probably hired by many of your members over the years to actually come in to look at their systems. He talked about how systems fail.
This overreliance, in my words, on this science-based system gives one, in my estimation, a false promise in a lot of ways, in the sense that simply because it's science-based, that makes it work. Let me just point to this HACCP system, which has what they call a CVS piece to it, a compliance verification system, which was run out as a piece of the model that all accepted. In fact, I would suggest that members of your coalition were probably quite keen to do so, and yet they ran it out as a pilot and no one ever verified if it worked.
Now, I took science in university, but I'm not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination. It seems to me that if you're going to have a system that you try and it is supposed to give you a certain result, it's like the hypothesis you used to get when you started out to do an experiment. You started out with a hypothesis, you had a methodology, you did the experiment, and then you verified it and came to a conclusion. But if you leave out the verification, how do you know it worked?
If you're talking about science, and if part of your science-based program is to verify, but you don't ever find out whether the system that talks about verifying actually indeed works, do you really have science? Do you have a science-based system or do you have a system that really has the name “science-based”? So everyone out there who hears the terminology goes, “Oh, it must be safe because it's about science.” In reality, what you have as a system is a shell with nothing inside it.
How do we get to the point where we actually build the system, where everyone says this is how we do it, and then we verify it and we all agree upon the verification of it, so that we indeed have a science-based system that truly is based on science, not on someone's wishes?