International Food Safety Network
former organization at Kansas State University
The International Food Safety Network (iFSN) at Kansas State University imparts the opportunity of improving the overall safety of the food supply by connecting all those in the agriculture and food industry.
iFSN offers a resource of evidence-based information through its website, listserves, research projects, on-farm food safety programs, publications, educational initiatives, graduate courses and policy analysis.
iFSN used to operate under the direction of Doug Powell.
History
International Food Safety Network began as a communications experiment, collecting and rapidly redistributing information about food safety using the then just-burgeoning Internet.
Created in January 1993, as a combination of Powell's interests in science, media and the public following an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 associated with Jack in the Box restaurants, in which over 600 were sickened and four died from undercooked hamburgers.
International Food Safety Network's emphasis is on the integration of public perceptions of food safety risks into traditional food safety risk analysis, and engaging the public on the nature of food-related risks and benefits.
Powell and the International Food Safety Network are a primary source for food safety information during outbreaks and are often quoted in mainstream media reports.
The International Food Safety Network was replaced with the bites mailing list and website according to a notice on the former's home page.
“International Food Safety Network” enters the record as former organization at Kansas State University. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what International, Food and Safety can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“International Food Safety Network” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, International, Food and Safety provides the most credible route into that argument.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q12188785. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1993.
Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
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Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “International Food Safety Network”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow International Food Safety Network primary sources, International Food Safety Network archive and International research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “International Food Safety Network” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.