Left-Right: Farm Food Safety. Food safety measures need to be taken by consumers.

Safe food is a major concern for maintaining good health. However, the definition of safe food varies among different groups of people such as consumers and producers. Whereas consumers will consider a food that is completely out of risk (zero risk) as safe, from the producers' perspective, safe foods are those that contain minimal level of risk. Indeed, there are so many aspects of food safety that keeping food safe for human consumption requires a series of measures from the production to the processing to the level of distribution by different groups of people working at the respective stages.
UN's Food and Agricultural organization (FAO) has divided foods into 15 main groups of commodities of which nine are of plant origin that include cereal, roots, tubers; pulses, nuts and oilseeds; vegetables, fruits, spices, stimulants and alcoholic beverages; while four are of animal origin including meat, offals; eggs, fish, sea foods and milk. And those from both plant and animal origin include sugar, honey, oils and fats. These different types of foods are maintained at their restrictive pH. This is so because the inherent pH is different in different foods and most of them are either of acidic or of neutral pH and the characteristic pH ranges of foods protect them from various microbial attacks. In this manner food safety is assured. Foods can also be contaminated directly by infected livestock or other animals (that humans eat), plants and also by air. Finally, foods can be adulterated by chemicals such as food additive, food residues, and antibiotics in feeding supplements and so on.
Microorganisms by contaminating food can damage its safety standard, thereby making it unfit for consumption. But this problem can be overcome through the safe handling of food as well as its proper management from the production phase to the distribution phase. Two organizations intimately involved in setting standards for food safety as it relates to microbial contamination are the International Commission on Microbiological Specifications for Foods (ICMSF) and Codex Alimentarius. The acute illnesses are less severe than the chronic and long term illnesses. In case of acute illnesses, most consumers who become ill think they have been attacked by flu and though taken seriously ill in many cases, they recover in a few days and go on about their lives. Food-borne illnesses due to microbes are well known and their causes and effects are relatively well established. The relationship between food, diet and chronic diseases and delayed illnesses is less well established. The link between spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease) and its variant creutzfeldt Jakob disease (vcjd) was confirmed using transgenic mice in 1999, but the time lag between exposure and illness is several years making epidemiological evidence in humans hard to establish. However, these issues cannot be ignored in terms of food safety to provide safe food for human consumption. For example, meat contaminated with Bacillus anthracis causes anthrax, a life threatening disease.
Although food supply in the United States is one of the safest in the world, each year about 76 million cases of illness occur, while more than 300,000 persons are hospitalized, and 5,000 die from food borne diseases. These diseases may range from diarrhoeal diseases to different forms of cancer. Preventive measures therefore are of utmost importance. Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) principles should be applied properly.
The five key principles of food hygiene according to WHO also should be taken into consideration which includes prevention of contaminating food with pathogens spreading from people, pets, and pests, separating raw and cooked foods to prevent contaminating the cooked foods, cooking foods for the appropriate length of time and at the appropriate temperature to kill pathogens, storing food at the proper temperature and using safe water and raw materials
The five key principles of food hygiene according to WHO should also be taken into consideration. Those include preventing food from being contaminated by pathogens spreading from people, pets, and pests; separating raw foods from and cooked ones to prevent any contamination of the cooked foods, cooking foods for the appropriate length of time and at the appropriate temperature to kill pathogens, storing food at the proper temperatures and using safe water and raw materials. Moreover, use of bio-pesticides and bio-fertilizers will reduce the chance of chemical contamination of food crops and vegetables and appropriate preservation methods will help to keep foods safe before those are finally consumed by people.

The writer is a Lecturer in Biotechnology, BRAC University.