Food and Nutrition

Food Safety & Hygiene

Food safety is a scientific discipline describing handling, preparation, and storage of food in ways that prevent food-borne illness. This is achieved through good hygiene and handling practices. Food hygiene is the conditions and measures necessary to ensure the safety of food from production to consumption. Food can become contaminated at any point during slaughtering or harvesting, processing, storage, distribution, transportation and preparation. This ensures food is fit for human consumption and avoids food poisoning, which is an acute, infectious or toxic illness, usually of sudden onset, caused by the consumption of contaminated food or water. Food safety considerations include the origins of food including the practices relating to food labelling, food hygiene, food additives and pesticide residues, as well as policies on biotechnology and food and guidelines for the management of governmental import and export inspection and certification systems for foods.