Food Safety: How You Can Achieve It

June 11, 2021
By Kano Shaper
Uncategorized

Food safety covers the handling, preparation, and storage of food to prevent foodborne illness. Yes, food can cause harm to your body if you’re not careful. Are you wondering how? Unsafe food tends to destroy or cause severe damage to many people.

Foodborne illnesses are a burden on public health and contribute significantly to the cost of health care. Therefore, we should make an effort to safeguard our foods and drinks from farm to table. We can say that food is safe if the food can not cause any harm or disease to the consumer.

What is food safety?

Food safety simply means handling, preparing and storing foods or drinks in the best way. A way that reduces the risks of consumers becoming sick from foodborne diseases. Food poisoning occurs when food becomes contaminated by bacteria, viruses and other germs, resulting in consumers illness. Food poisoning can be treated at home. However, It can sometimes be severe and require urgent medical attention.

Knowing how to protect consumers from food poisoning is essential. Hence, the food safety principle. This principle aims to prevent food from becoming contaminated and causing food poisoning.

Food safety can be achieved in five fundamental pillars:

Proper cleaning and sanitizing of all surfaces, equipment and utensils.
Maintaining a high level of personal hygiene, especially hand washing.
Temperature control by keeping food cold when required and keeping foods hot when needed.
Food storage; storing foods and drinks in a way that prevents cross-contamination.
Food handling by cooking, reheating and cooling off foods, and the prevention of cross-contamination in the process.

Who is Responsible for Ensuring Safety Measures?

Food safety is quite essential at home, restaurants, retail stores and factories. So, you and I play a vital role. Every nation defines and establishes its laws and enforcement practices for food safety regulation. These regulations may vary from country to country and domestically from region to region. Bringing a food product to a foreign market requires compliance with that nation’s regulation—also, consumer protection laws and its regional governmental authorities.

Generally, every individual is responsible for observing the above fundamental pillars. In addition, the personal hygiene of food handlers also plays a significant role in achieving food safety.

Personal Hygiene of Food Handlers

Individuals handling foods should have a high standard of personal hygiene like:

Wear a cap or tie your hair back before handling foods to ensure that no hairs fall into the food.
Thoroughly wash hands with soap and warm water before, during and after handling food. This is to avoid transferring germs from your hands to the food.
Avoid handling food with bare hands by wearing gloves.
Wear clean clothes to work to avoid transferring the germs from dirty clothes to the food

Importance of Food Safety and Food Hygiene

Prevent germs from multiplying in foods and reaching dangerous levels.
Promotes healthy living as it ensures daily healthy family living.
It helps to protect the health of consumers from foodborne illnesses and food poisoning.
Creating a food safety and hygiene policy will ensure all employees know how to contribute to appropriate work practices.

In addition to reducing foodborne illnesses, it can also yield economic and social benefits:

Lessen the loss of income and health care tolls for the affected individuals.
Improved productive capacity.
Reduced weight on the country’s healthcare methodology through improved public health.
A safer food supply, from farm to fork.
Consumer confidence in food supply leading to economic stability throughout the food sector.
It keeps one healthy and prevents the additional costs of buying medications and medical check-ups.

Consequences of Non-compliance to Food Safety

Food safety is a global concern that covers a variety of different parts of everyday life. There has been an increasing awareness of food safety by the general public. Non-compliance to food safety principles could lead to:

Severe diseases and illness in society.
Gastroenteritis and dehydration
Severe health problems such as kidney failure or death.

Food safety problems are a leading cause of more than 200 preventable diseases worldwide. Each year, one in ten people suffer from foodborne illness or injury. The CDC recently estimated 48million people get sick from foodborne illness, and about 420,000 die worldwide each year.

Although anyone can get a foodborne illness, some category of people is more prone. These are:

Children (younger than 5years),
Pregnant women,
Elderly (above 50years of age),
Immune-compromised patients, especially HIV and cancer patients, are at greater risk.

Therefore, to avoid loss of life and promote good health, it is imperative for food safety to be implemented throughout the food chain.