FOOD SAFETY :A Dream Or Reality In Food Processing Cycle

FOOD SAFETY In this prompt, we invite you to tell us. What do you understand as food safety? How does poor storage of food cause illness? What are the roles of personal hygiene to food safety.

Walter Otto
Food safety could be defined as processes and procedures, including policies, made to prevent food contamination and make food safe for consumption. Those preventive measures are meant to be strictly complied with by these organisations and all who handle food, from the manufacturers to the sellers, down to the final consumer.

Because of the importance of food safety, there are governmental bodies set up to ensure that quality control, assurance, and product certification are obtained to ensure that the foods manufactured meet quality and assurance standards before it is certified good for sale and subsequent consumption.

In manufacturing companies, samples of these foods are sent to the production lab where tests are conducted to confirm their quality before they are ticked good for further production processes. Until the process is completed and the product is approved and confirmed by the quality assurance, nobody disburses to the warehouse for sale. This is to prevent the fear of consuming substandard products flooding the market.

Streets of Food

Food safety is important in families, organisations, and personal life. There are personal hygiene practices meant to be observed before handling food, such as hand washing. For those of us who are conversant with the food industry (manufacturing firms), they observe lots of personal hygiene, including covering hair, wearing coveralls, cutting nails, covering beards, and wearing nose masks. etc. If personal hygiene is not observed, it may lead to contamination and food poisoning, which in turn can result in sickness.

zash capturing
Furthermore, food storage is important for food safety. Quality control and assurance will always give an acceptable room temperature, moisture content, and dryness. A storage centre free from rodent and insect infestation is deemed fit. All these are meant to prevent food contamination caused by parasites, organisms, and algae that form on the food due to breaches of safety measures during production. But when those foods that breached the safety standards get out to the public and are consumed, it leads to different illnesses and sometimes to death when not properly managed.

In conclusion, while NAFDAC and SON are official organisations set up to ensure food quality control. They are not always there to monitor these processes from start to finish; they collect a mere sample for testing and subsequent approval.

I think that food safety is everybody’s responsibility, starting from the manufacturers, storage, and sellers, down to the final consumer. And these can be achieved by sincerely practicing personal hygiene by all stakeholders. When all hands are on deck, food contamination and risk of food poisoning will be drastically reduced, making our food safe for consumption.

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