one of the things that my job involves has been ensuring the inclusion of food fortification in liberia's food safety and quality control systems. this is, believe it or not, fascinating. as with many things in liberia, systems that were in place before the war need to be revived, or, in some cases, created from scratch. in the case of food safety, there are efforts underway to do the latter. there are currently four or five government agencies charged with various (and sometimes overlapping) areas of responsibility within the umbrella of "food safety," and one of the major current challenges is coordination and responsibility mapping among those agencies. it's an incredibly impressive undertaking to watch and, in a small way, be a part of.
since i'm in the middle of all of this here, a quick blurb in the scienceinsider blog caught my eye. it's mostly about the weirdness of NOAA being under commerce, rather than interior, but the quote pulled from a speech given by barack obama also points out that there are over a dozen agencies involved in food safety in the US. this is pretty demonstrably not an ideal system we've got going. it's just sort of one of those moments that serve as reminders to stay humble as an outsider trying to tool around with another country's system. sometimes it's easy to get frustrated or, worse, condescending, when dealing with those developing systems, until you remember that, to some degree, you're holding your host government to higher standards than you're holding your own.
alright. enough of the sanctimonious crap. back to our regularly scheduled diarrhea jokes and youtube clips.
since i'm in the middle of all of this here, a quick blurb in the scienceinsider blog caught my eye. it's mostly about the weirdness of NOAA being under commerce, rather than interior, but the quote pulled from a speech given by barack obama also points out that there are over a dozen agencies involved in food safety in the US. this is pretty demonstrably not an ideal system we've got going. it's just sort of one of those moments that serve as reminders to stay humble as an outsider trying to tool around with another country's system. sometimes it's easy to get frustrated or, worse, condescending, when dealing with those developing systems, until you remember that, to some degree, you're holding your host government to higher standards than you're holding your own.
alright. enough of the sanctimonious crap. back to our regularly scheduled diarrhea jokes and youtube clips.
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