[Darin Detwiler] Hi, welcome to Spoiler Alert!. I'm Dr. Darin Detwiler, and this is my co-host,
[Callin Godson-Green] Callin Godson-Green.
[Darin Detwiler] Excellent. We are recording here at IAFP in Cleveland, Ohio.
[Callin Godson-Green] The one and only.
[Darin Detwiler] It is the one and only Cleveland, Ohio. And you know, when I think Cleveland, Ohio, the last thing that comes to mind is windmills. But you know what comes to mind when I think of windmills?
[Callin Godson-Green] What?
[Darin Detwiler] Amsterdam. And you know what comes to mind when I think of Amsterdam.
[Callin Godson-Green]
No.
[Darin Detwiler] How I met our guest. We're being joined here by Ian Westcott, and I had a great pleasure of meeting him last year in Amsterdam. And I don't know if many people know who you are, because you haven't been in your current role for too, long.
[Ian Westcott] Nope, we're just reaching a year now.
[Darin Detwiler] Excellent. So will you tell our audience who you are and what you do, sir?
[Ian Westcott] Okay, so my name's Ian Westcott. I am the editor of New Food. So we are newfoodmagazine.com, but we are as digital as the industry is evolving around us now. So we are referred to as New Food. And we bring high integrity advice on the food industry, particularly around food safety being our core topic, to an increasingly global audience.
[Darin Detwiler] Have you ever seen New Food magazine? I remember it when it was in print. but it is a predominantly global and European readership. So, we're here at this event here. It's an international event, but it's in the United States. There are different conversations about food safety depending on where you go. I've been in Dubai and the conversation is one thing there. I've been in Mexico City. The conversation's there. I've been in Europe many, many times. The conversation tends to migrate towards things like integrity are much more predominant than they are in other places. Have you encountered that, sometimes where you go, the conversation priorities change?
[Callin Godson-Green] Absolutely. Even just between like having worked in Ireland and then comparison to New York, completely different. Focus and, priorities do not align at all. So God bless you guys in your work, try to cover everyone and make it interesting and relevant for all. And you find it here, even, you know, depending on what session you're sitting in, where the person is based from, they'll have one perspective on something. And then you might go next door. And if it's a US based business or group, they're talking about it in a completely different way.
[Darin Detwiler] I'd love to start off with talking about AI.
[Ian Westcott] Yeah.
[Darin Detwiler] Because you recently attended an event on AI and had some strong thoughts about it.
[Ian Westcott] Honestly, I think with AI, I think the level of progress that we are going to see is going to snowball. So I have actually just come freshly from a panel talking about AI now. And I feel like 2024 and 2025's events, there was enormous shift in the level of tangibility that is able to be demonstrated because we previously kind of have it as a holistic concept. We can kind of see where, yes, theoretically this may help now, but now we have start to finish feedback loops that are feeding data lakes, they're closing gaps. They are becoming increasingly reliable, I would say. And I think it's a difficult conversation because you have to get the culture within your company that trust this, but keep a sort of a core of critical thinking. So, because ultimately it is still learning and it can hallucinate.
[Darin Detwiler] What if I want to hear it being like brutally honest, even telling me things that aren't convenient or aren't necessarily what I want to hear, but I want to hear the truth. Is that a growing concern you think we're going to see between 2025 and 2026?
[Ian Westcott] I think it could possibly be. I mean, and if you do a quick Google and you can see that anyone has vanity checked this situation themselves, I think it does tend to be a little bit on the agreeable side at the moment.
[Callin Godson-Green] It's afraid.
[Ian Westcott] So yeah, I think that's something that we have to be aware of. So when people program an individual agent for themselves, say, a lot of people tend to spear it on the more critical side if you want good honest feedback. And if you're quality checking something, the last thing you want is confirmation bias, Bill Sim.
[Darin Detwiler] The quality check, if you look at AI, look at ChatGTP, look at all these different platforms, right? It's taking information from random sources. And just because it's recent or popular doesn't mean that it's actually accurate.
[Callin Godson-Green] Yes.
[Darin Detwiler] And so it starts to tell you what it thinks you want to hear, and it'll even start to make things up. And yet you have to, as a user, whether you're the chief information officer or an editor, You have to go, okay, that is one source of information. I need to verify that. I need to take that and now take that work from there. So even if you were to say, look, we have all this data and we put this data into some AI and it's telling us this, that's one evaluation of that. I would say before you start making some decisions based on AI analytics of data, A, you got to have really good vetted cleaned data that's accurate and complete that goes into it. But you would want to check your AI over and over and over again to make sure that you get that second, third opinion, if you will, through AI, such that you're able to now go back to your board, go back to your team and say, I think we want to interpret it this way. I was in a future food tech event in San Francisco earlier this year. And they said, don't think of AI as taking the place of your lab assistant. Think of it as, or as your lab director or as your professor. Think of it as a graduate assistant who is helping the professor. The professor still has to verify these things. The CIO, the food safety quality assurance advisor, whatever it is, the director, supervisor of it, the VP of this, still needs to validate these things, but can get a quicker sense of indicators through them. But it's not the only indicator, it's not the only authoritative voice on this.
[Ian Westcott] Yeah, I think that the operators within the company, I think the people that are using AI that are the key holders of the process, I think they have to almost see themselves more as the curator. So I think certainly at this moment, at the speed things are accelerating, it's always hard to look ahead a couple of years at the moment, a lot's changed. But yeah, I think if you see the employees that are using these things as the curators, I think it is, it will become far more outcome based. I think it will be outcome thinking. And if you take a critical approach.
[Darin Detwiler] What's possibly also how you're using the AI, right? Would you use ChatGTP to go, what are four or five airports close to Cleveland, Ohio that I could land at? Sure. I could see that, right? But you would not probably use ChatGTP, how would I fly an airplane from London to Cleveland, Ohio, or from New York to Cleveland, Ohio? It's like somewhere we draw a line, and where you draw that line might be different than where you draw that line. Yeah. But I think that we have to ask ourselves and our teams, you know, where are we feeling comfortable in terms of the line has to be drawn here if you're going to use AI.
[Ian Westcott] Yeah, well, It's a challenge. I mean, I'm sure you engage with LinkedIn quite a lot. After a while, you get a sense when someone is outsourcing far too much of their output to AI. So, yeah, I think if you communicate it well, I think it really is now, you are still an early mover as an organization. And, you know, we're talking food today, but any organization, your employees are likely to use it either surreptitiously or under your, you know, stewardship, let's say. So I think that you should be proactive on this part of your operation. And I think that you should be saying, this is what we are able to do. This is what we aren't able to do. You know, this kind of thing. The organization has to step forward and lead, not just allow that, you know, to unravel around you.
[Darin Detwiler] Well, I think an interesting temperature check that we could kind of take is, I believe the conversation around authenticity when you're using AI is something that's on a lot more people's minds than authenticity of the food we eat. And yet, you would think that authenticity of the food we eat is something that should be kind of foundational. And what I find interesting is, authenticity of the food we eat is not just ingredients. It could be how authentic is it from this region? How authentic is this an Irish recipe? How authentic is it that this is organic or GMO free? You were talking about GMOs earlier. How authentic is it and do whatever is on the label? I don't think the average consumer has that kind of a conversation nearly as much as we're talking about authenticity of AI.
[Callin Godson-Green] No way.
[Darin Detwiler] Why do you think that is?
[Callin Godson-Green] Almost assumption that what they have is legitimate and true. Like, I think it wouldn't even cross someone's mind until they encountered an issue with food fraud or something similar. And like, I always, I know it's probably the most obvious example, but we always use honey as the example for food fraud, like that the amount of honey sold in one particular region of the world is triple the amount that the ever produced legitimately and sold or should be sold across the globe. people don't know that it's a risk until something unfortunately bad happens. And with AI, because we're in that kind of novel stage, the almost bad stuff is happening now. So you're seeing it. And then that's why it's front of mind. Like, I don't know. I think AI, because it's new, people love to stress test new things. You're always cautious. I'm the same. Like when I use it for personal reasons, I'll throw in usually something I know to be true to make sure that it picks up on that. So my example was coming to Cleveland. I wanted to see if the Mets by chance were going to be here. So I put in all my dates that I was going to be everywhere traveling for work to see did any of them line up with a Mets game. And I threw in one trip that was fake to San Francisco when I knew they were going to be there to make sure that the ChatGPT pulled it and said, like, they will be here these dates. It won't be here these days. Spoiler alert, it still got it wrong. So, and that's something quite simple and the information is easily available. I just felt lazy when I was doing it, but it's just good to know.
[Ian Westcott] It's a form of calibration.
[Callin Godson-Green] Yeah, exactly.
[Darin Detwiler] Well, in the publishing world, I would imagine that, you know, you don't want to publish an article that has untruths or stretches of the truths or that aren't as authentic as it would seem from the writer. What do you do in terms of checking that?
[Ian Westcott] We do encounter it. The first thing you do, so in the worst examples of it, things like references and things like that. So we are, food safety is our core topic number one. So you have to validate every article, whether it is an external contributor or not. You have to validate it because when we put this article out, I'm putting my name, my face to it, but also we are in an area of science that there is a moral obligation to do that. I mean, you could put out a dangerous mistruth and someone can act on that. So yeah, it's absolutely down to the people within the editorial team to do this. And as AI has been sort of around us for the longer we've been amongst this, you also start to get a better sense of what is likely to be AI as well. You know, you read things like the delves and the em-dashes absolutely everywhere, which I think It's like self-conscious because they're.
[Darin Detwiler] Like, wait, I've always been using M dashes.
[Ian Westcott] Yeah, right. Yeah.
[Darin Detwiler] Well, let me ask you, in your education, did you go to writing school? Did you?
[Ian Westcott] I actually, yeah, I did. So I changed it. Well, I've originally started off in finance. And to be quite honest, I didn't really feel like I had a kind of, it wasn't a vocation, whereas editorial, I retrained basically. So yeah, and particularly working in food safety, everything that we publish feels like it really matters, you know, like it has to have a core through line of integrity. So yeah, it's been fantastic so far and in one year, but there is a lot to learn.
[Darin Detwiler] That core understanding that core lesson opportunity, learning opportunity, whether you're in financing, whether you're in writing, whether you're in the food industry, I would think that perhaps a course on ethics and morals and things of that nature would be a pretty good, it almost doesn't matter what is your graduate degree. But you would think if you're getting a master's degree or a doctorate level degree, in any field, you're probably going to be put in a supervisory, leadership, thought leader, kind of a position. And imagine going through all that and you never had a course that looked at ethics and morals and things of that nature. I think about that quite often. I think about that as, should it be an additional course to your workload or should it be something that the institution should make sure that somewhere along the line, it should have incorporated some element of accountability, morality, ethics, because it seems to be prevalent in almost everything. Just as we're talking about authenticity with AI, we could obviously have the same conversation with food. And if people are making these decisions, and one of the things that we keep hearing over and over again is about how complete and how truthful the communication is with the consumer and the questions that they're asking. And if that is not True, right? You could also say the communication between a leader and the workforce. And I'll ask this to both of you. Do you think that all this move with AI is not only asking us to rethink morality and ethics in terms of AI, but also in terms of other sectors like the food industry? Even more so than before.
[Callin Godson-Green] Yeah, the idea of misinformation and disinformation has kind of come up again because of AI. And it's like that fine line between, you know, I think during the pandemic, misinformation started again. And the idea of it, people learned what it was. And that was more focused on deliberate misinformation. But with AI, there's this shift towards like, you know, it can be accidental too. Like someone can say something and it's incorrect, but I take it as truth for whatever reason. I don't do that fact checking or background checking. And I spread this. Like right now, I could say something that I thought was true and then it spreads and it's it becomes this kind of thing with legs and it's accidental. I read it from AI and I didn't know to double check the AI sources. So I think it's kind of come up again for that reason. And it is top of mind. People are maybe a bit more hesitant. They're aware that, you know, the concepts can be there and they can be incorrect. But I don't know. Do you think the safeguards are in place? Like, have you found that you've gotten submissions or people want articles published and you kind of kind of kick the tires a bit and you're like, where did this information actually come from? And then realize that it was all built on something that maybe wasn't true either on purpose or, genuine confusion.
[Ian Westcott] Yeah, I would say you're absolutely right to ask that question. It happens A lot. Luckily, we filter it very robustly and I've got a very deep trust in my team at all levels to if that comes in, that gets bounced straight back out. But yeah, I think what you were saying about the core morality of it, I think our morality, we are being confronted by this now. You log on to Instagram, maybe there's a video of Dr. Darren Detweiler saying something incredibly inflammatory that never actually happened. You can get that so close. That can happen.
[Darin Detwiler] I actually have a video I downloaded from a TikTok, I believe, of someone I know, and you can tell it was like... My mouth was moving and there were other words and it was, it was not her voice. I know her. It's like, and this, I'm like, she did not say that. And that freaked me out because I, there's no, I've never encountered someone who I know who I'm watching a video of someone went and manipulated those words and were basically were using her credibility to, you know, to sell some idea or some product or whatever. And it's kind of, it's stared me. There's a lot of videos of me out there.
[Callin Godson-Green] And more now.
[Darin Detwiler] Yes, thank you very much. And this is my authentic concern that I'm raising, that I do think about that. What if someone takes my wonderful, charming presence on camera and decides, hey, we're going to put some other words in it? Because now I think that information and truth and accuracy has become more political than ever before. Now, someone could say, oh, it's always been political. I think it's kind of, the temperature's gone up a little bit in terms of how political it has become in the last decade or so. But we can all tell that, you know, there's the truth and then there's the truth that people want you to hear. Yeah. And then there's the truth that people are going to manipulate and put out there and say, this is the only truth. And you're like, no, I know there's more truth to that. And you know, when we're talking about, look, Maslow's hierarchy of needs is telling us that people need to have their basic core needs taken first before they can deal with the social or the esteem or these other elements in terms of dealing with the truth. Right now, they need warmth, they need food, they need water, they need health, they need sleep, they need these basic physiological elements taken care of first. But if those become the items that are politicized and the truth is manipulated, then you're putting them in a disadvantage. What are some topics, kind of like spoiler alerts, what are some topics you're seeing covered more within the food industry, magazines, periodicals, that you are surprised because they weren't being talked about a year or two or five ago.
[Ian Westcott] I mean, we've come across psychoactives recently. We all know that there's been some sort of public conversation happening around that. But psychoactives, I did not really come across my desk until the latter end of the year. And the other one I'd say is PFAS. So the thing with PFAS is just by the terminology, per- and polyfluoroalkyls, sorry. It's hard for me to say, so very hard for a consumer to get their head around. But I've started to notice a lot more consumer demand around PFAS free items. And PFAS free items aren't all entirely PFAS free, so you have that kind of conversation going on as well. And sitting talking to food safety experts, especially like yourself, Darren, we've actually spoken about this before, I think, on a webinar. The scale of that challenge is beyond anything. It's in our pine trees, it's in our water, it's everywhere. It's probably all over us now. And there are no tangible, there's no concrete steps you can really take to avoid PFAS as part of your day. So, I'm finding that consumers are starting to talk about topics that we would have thought that were much more on our technical leader side. Yeah. so I would say PFAS is probably the prominent one I spoke about this year.
[Darin Detwiler] And you know what? It's I think it's. Probably because not necessarily that they're seeing it talked about in magazines or webinars or things of that such, but because they are seeing it's becoming more prevalent in their food. When we drive for more convenience, more ready to eat, more commercially packaged goods, we're seeing an increase in how much plastics, how much packaging, how much other issues are going along with that conversation. And now it's in our kitchens, you know, it's on our countertops, it's in our refrigerators, in our pantries. And there's a point where we can no longer, as consumers, ignore so much topics.
[Ian Westcott] Yeah. And it's also very difficult from the point of view of regular, like regulatory compliance. In America, it's currently a complete patchwork. We have a different situation going on in the EU. We've taken some really good leadership steps there. But of course, the UK and Brexit, so that now is something completely individual. And like we always talk about, this is a fundamentally global problem. It is 1 food system. So how do you comply? Do you see what I mean? At the lowest level of contamination?
[Darin Detwiler] Well, Ian Westcott of New Food Magazine, newfoodmagazine.com.
[Ian Westcott] That's right. Yep.
[Darin Detwiler] Newfoodmagazine.com. You got to check it out. Fascinating articles from a global perspective, much more European. And I have to admit, it is refreshing to look at the idea of you can look at issues for, or you can look at topics and issues from an American perspective, but looking at it from a global perspective, sometimes it's validating, sometimes it's eye-opening, sometimes it's both.
[Ian Westcott] Well, thank you very much for having me.
[Callin Godson-Green] Thank you.
[Darin Detwiler] Thank you very much. And for spoiler alert, I'm Dr. Darren Detweiler.
[Callin Godson-Green] Callin Godson-Green.
[Darin Detwiler] See you next time.
