What is food safety?

Food is essentially a part of human to sustain life. In order to provide healthy and wholesome food to consumers, food safety is of a key concern during the receiving, preparation and transportation of food.

Food safety is:

1) Protecting the food supply from microbial, chemical (ie rancidity, browning) and physical (ie drying out, infestation) hazards or contamination that may occur during all stages of food production and handling-growing, harvesting, processing, transporting, preparing, distributing and storing. The goal of food safety monitoring is to keep food wholesome.

Quoted from: Rhode island food safety education. (2000). Glossary. Retrieved April 2, 2007 from www.uri.edu/ce/ceec/food/factsheets/glossary.html

2) Food safety is a scientific discipline describing the handling, preparation, and storage of food in ways that prevent Foodborne illness.

Quoted from: Wikipedia. (2007). Food safety. Retrieved April 2, 2007 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_safety

Since food safety is of high importance in the food and beverage industry, goverment bodies; national and internationl comes into the picture. These organisations are the legal bodies that controls and monitors the safety of food by inspection, quality control and checks to ensure that the food reaching the consumers meets the safety standards and are wholesome. These regulating legal bodies are the World Health Organisation (WHO) at the international level and Food and Drug Adminstration-US (FDA), Agri-food and Vetinary Authority of Singapore (AVA) at the national level. Singapore's very own AVA set standards for the food imported from other countries and conduct checks on the food to protect the people from food related illness.

Therefore, despite the fact that people are constantly looking for alternative ways to produce cheap and good food and no doubt technology is improving as well and people are also into producing food that is healthy, organic and has the ability to prolong life.

but we should stop to ponder about the safety of this foods.


Yes, they have have certain benefits that we are looking for and on top of it, it may be cheap BUT have you considered the possiblity that the food may actually be unsafe?


The most important factor that a person working in food industry should have is the integrity that he/she will only produce food that is safe for human consumption, for the safety of produced food should come before anything else.


Food safety is important because consuming unsafe food can cause food borne illness and may even result in death!


What's more important than life?!


So, now are you going to just look at the price of the food and its nutritional value? or is food safety now a major concern for you as well?