Our mission, research team, active studies, and how to get involved.
Mission Statement
Food Safety Compass was established to address a persistent gap in public health historiography: the systematic underreporting and under-analysis of mycotoxin-related contamination events, particularly those occurring in Soviet-era and Eastern European grain systems, where records remained inaccessible or unpublished for decades.
The contamination of cereal crops by Claviceps purpurea — the ergot fungus — and related mycotoxin-producing organisms represents one of history's most consequential and least-acknowledged public health risks. Unlike cholera or typhoid, ergotism left no obvious pathogen trail. Its victims were frequently misdiagnosed, their symptoms attributed to hysteria, divine punishment, or environmental factors. The result is a historical record that is fragmentary at best.
Our goal is to recover and publish that record — drawing on primary archival sources, regional medical documentation, and field-based investigation — in a form accessible to researchers, policymakers, and the general public.
Research Team
Casey Turton is the founder and principal editor of Food Safety Compass. With a background in health research and organizational consulting, he established the publication to address the lack of accessible, historically grounded food safety literature — particularly concerning mycotoxin events in the mid-twentieth-century Soviet and Eastern European context.
Turton oversees editorial direction, commissions field research, and serves as primary author for foundational mycotoxin and policy history articles. He is based in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and coordinates with regional correspondents across Europe and Central Asia.
[Surname] is the publication's lead field correspondent for Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. She coordinates directly with regional state archives, institutional libraries, and local research networks to access primary documentation on Soviet agricultural policy, grain management, and food safety records from the mid-twentieth century.
Her current assignment for Food Safety Compass focuses on the Sverdlovsk Oblast and surrounding Ural administrative region, where she is conducting on-site archival research into ergot contamination patterns in the 1950s and early 1960s grain supply. She works under a formal research commission from Food Safety Compass / Wellness Compass, Inc.
We are seeking a researcher with archival access and language proficiency in Polish, German, or Czech to assist with the Central European Rye Belt historical review. Independent researchers and affiliated academics welcome.
Active & Planned Research
A field and archival investigation examining ergot contamination patterns in Soviet-era rye supply chains across the Ural administrative region. The study draws on regional agricultural records, medical reports, and contemporaneous grain inspection documents to assess the prevalence and distribution of Claviceps purpurea contamination in civilian and institutional grain supplies.
The Ural region presents a particularly significant case study: as both a major rye-producing zone and a site of substantial post-war population stress, it experienced conditions well-documented elsewhere as preconditions for ergotism outbreaks — yet the regional medical and agricultural literature from this period remains largely uncatalogued in accessible form.
Examination of ergotism outbreak records across the primary historical rye-growing regions of Poland, northern Germany, and the Baltic states.
Documented ergot contamination in teff and barley crops across the Amhara and Tigray highlands. Significant outbreak records exist but remain poorly indexed.
A comparative policy review of aflatoxin and ergot alkaloid regulation in Indian and Pakistani cereal supply chains during the period of industrial agricultural expansion.
Support the Work
Food Safety Compass is a non-commercial independent research initiative. All contributions go directly toward archival access fees, field research costs, translation services, and publication. There is no institutional funding.
Field archival research — particularly in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union — involves access fees, official request processing, document reproduction, and extended residency costs. Your support makes this work possible.
Make a Contribution Read the ResearchGet in Touch
We welcome correspondence from researchers, archivists, and institutions with relevant source material or interest in collaborative work. We also accept tips, document submissions, and corrections to published material.