Sarah Muirhead, Feedstuffs, will be the presenter for the session Food Safety and Consumer Confidence – What’s Making News, at the Agribusiness Forum, November 13-14 in Kansas City.

American consumers have been jolted by food safety scares in the past year ranging from dirty spinach to sickening peanut butter. Yet it was the case of contaminated pet food from China that seemed to galvanize public opinion that something in the system has gone awry. That’s just the way it is: consumers and newspaper readers can be fickle, walking away from serious stories about their own health in favor of less weighty pieces about dogs and cats. So how and why does the media react the way it does when it comes to covering food safety-related issues and what implications does that have on consumers?

Sarah Muirhead covers the feed, food, pet and agricultural sectors for Feedstuffs. She has followed the Chinese food scare, the rise of the organic and natural industries, the labeling debate surrounding bovine somatotropin in milk and the food industry’s chase for consumer dollars, sometimes at the expense of the science, and what’s in the best interest of the rest of the food chain. Sarah has been covering the issues for Feedstuffs for 25 years. She graduated from the University of Illinois in Champaign, Ill.

To register for the Agribusiness Forum visit http://payment.nama.org/forum.htm.