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Andrea Etter is an Assistant Professor of Nutrition and Food Science and is December 2022's Food Systems Research Center Researcher of the Month. Andrea's expertise is in food microbiology and she has been doing some very interesting work since joining ����̽̽ in 2019 (and before!). Get to know Andrea and her work below!

1. What current food systems research are you conducting?
I currently have three major research projects, looking at food safety in different parts of the food system. One project investigates whether Salmonella from foodborne outbreaks have any special stress tolerances—heat, sanitizers, etc—and if we can predict stress tolerance by studying gene expression in unstressed bacteria. The Salmonella in this study were collected by the USDA/FD from food during outbreak investigations and routine product testing, so they’re representative of what a consumer might actually consume in their food during a Salmonella outbreak.

The second project focuses on manufacturing. It studies biofilms formed by Listeria monocytogenes. Cathy Donnelly collected from artisan cheese producers’ facilities (mostly floors and drains) 10-15 years ago. We give the Listeria their best possible opportunity to form deeply entrenched, mature biofilms and then use SEM microscopy to see what these biofilms look like before and after we add Lysol-type or bleach sanitizers. Unfortunately, it’s a pretty bleak picture—a fully mature Listeria biofilm almost always has surviving bacteria after sanitization, despite Listeria being a relatively anemic biofilm former.

Finally, my most systems-wide project is investigating Salmonella in backyard chicken flocks and in the chicks that are sold every spring in agricultural supply stores. Because we get samples from the shipping boxes the chicks come in, we can tell that the chicks often arrive at the stores already infected with Salmonella, instead of getting infected at the store, which is good(ish) news for store owners. For chicken and chick lovers, it’s bad news, though, because we find about 40% of chick shipments have Salmonella—so it’s pretty risky to kiss baby chicks or put them up near your face (though it’s hard to stop people from doing that when chicks are so cute).

All these projects involve both graduate and undergraduate students, and I’ve been fortunate to have a great lab group. We published a paper on the adult side of the backyard chicken research this fall, and it nearly all the authors were current or former undergraduate researchers. Helping my students grow as scientists and witnessing their curiosity and enthusiasm is the best part of my job.

2. What got you interested in food systems research?
I have always like to connect ideas and even fields together—it’s my favorite mode of learning, and it also heavily informs my teaching style—so systems-based research is a natural fit for me. Vermont and the northeast have a small farm-based food system, which is very different from the large farms of the Midwest and Western parts of the U.S., and this type of farm and food system is relatively understudied. I also have a personal connection to homesteading—my parents moved from Chicago to rural WI when I was a small child, and took up homesteading, complete with goats for milk and meat, sheep for meat and wool, and poultry for eggs and meat. Vermont is home to many similar homesteads and small farms, and my training in food safety and microbiology gave me a new perspective on our farming practices and the zoonotic risks from them. It’s also important to me that my work is beneficial to Vermonters, and along with figuring out what the risks are, I’m hoping to work with extension and farmers to develop solutions that are feasible for small farms and homesteads.

3. How is your FSRC-funded research impacting Vermonters?
Lauren Smathers, one of my undergraduate researchers, was awarded a Food SURF from the FSRC in Summer 2022 to research the prevalence of pathogens in raw milk from Vermont’s tier I (less regulated) farms and homesteads. Lauren collected samples from 5 farms across Vermont and tested them for Staphylococcus aureus, Listeria monocytogenes, Escherichia coli, Salmonella enterica, and Campylobacter jejuni. We were pleasantly surprised to not find any pathogens in the samples, but we did find non-pathogenic E. coli, which tells us there was fecal contamination during milking. So, the good news that there weren’t any pathogens is tempered by the bad news that if the dairy animals had been shedding foodborne pathogens in their feces, the pathogens would have contaminated the milk.

Lauren also conducted a survey to learn about farmers’ background knowledge of raw milk, practices in producing it, and opinions on the safety of raw milk. The survey highlighted that farmers were under-educated about potential pathogens in raw milk, as well as highlighted the mistrust from many farmers towards any sort of government-required testing. Lauren was also able to talk more with many of these farmers while collecting the milk samples and understand better why this distrust is present and what sort of steps could be made to bridge the gap between legislation and family farms. Ultimately, our research underscores that raw milk is always going to be a high-risk food for pathogens, because it is so easily contaminated, but it is also a food that carries high emotions and strong political implications. We hope to collaborate with others in future to develop materials that might be more persuasive than the standard messaging against raw millk.

4. Where do you see the role of your field in expanding research on food systems at ����̽̽ and beyond?
Food safety affects every part of the food system, from farm to fork. For any food system, the biggest goal is to adequately nourish the people it serves so they can survive and thrive. Food safety issues threaten that—a food system that regularly sickens or kills people is not an adequate or viable food system. With Vermont’s aging population, food safety is even more important. Above 65, the human immune system becomes less effective at fighting off pathogens, so what might be “only” diarrhea in a young adult may become dehydration, organ failure, sepsis, meningitis or lead to death. Making sure the food system yields safe food and that food safety best practices for cooking are effectively communicated is crucial to protecting Vermonters.

Apart from the human toll, foodborne disease also carries heavy financial implications for the farms and food companies implicated. Outbreaks of foodborne illness can and do bankrupt food companies implicated in them. For Vermont’s food system, with its many small food companies, a foodborne outbreak is especially serious. A Chipotle or BlueBell Ice Cream-sized company can weather the bad press, recalls, investigations, and lawsuits from a foodborne outbreak. A small food producer is less likely to survive, as witnessed by Vulto Creamery’s demise after a listeriosis outbreak was traced to its cheeses in 2017. Consequently, a sustainable food system must invest in understanding and mitigating food safety challenges for the farms and companies involved, not only to promote human health and thriving, but also to protect its own survival

5. What is something about you people would be surprised to learn?
I was homeschooled, and as a result, I had free time to learn a lot of fun skills—sewing, spinning, weaving, crocheting, drawing, horse training, and gardening, among others. I don’t have a lot of time for any of those anymore, but I still dabble in them.

6. What’s your favorite thing about living in Vermont?
Definitely the fall colors. They were good in Wisconsin, but Vermont’s are incredible

7. What TV show, band/artist, podcast, video game, book, and/or anything are you most obsessed with right now?
My favorite podcast series right now is This Podcast Will Kill You. It’s run by two doctors in public health fields, and mostly focuses on infectious disease, with a few episodes on Huntington’s disease or other genetic/non-communicable disorders. Naturally, it includes episodes on Salmonella Typhi, non-typhoidal Salmonella, shigatoxigenic E. coli, and other food safety bad bugs, so I like to link those episodes in Blackboard for NFS 203: Food Microbiology. For book series, I started the Lord Peter Whimsey Mysteries series last week. I’d read Gaudy Night in high school literature and not really liked it, but it’s fairly far along in the series, so I had always wondered if the rest of the series was more interesting (it is). Whimsey is a much less arrogant detective than Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes, perhaps because his livelihood isn’t involved. He’s mostly just a curious fellow who happens to notice things around him and make hypotheses. There are also a lot of literary and biblical references in the series, so I enjoy that as well. It’s a fun series.