Food Hygiene, otherwise known as Food Safety can be defined as handling, preparing, and storing food or drink in a way that best reduces the risk of consumers becoming sick from the food-borne disease. The principles of food safety aim to prevent food from becoming contaminated and causing food poisoning. With this in mind, ensuring that food is safe for human consumption is likely the most critical part of the food preparation process.
Food hygiene is important for the following reasons:
- If food or drink is not safe to eat, you cannot eat or drink. The easiest example of this is safe drinking water. We would never drink water that did not come from a reputable source. The very same principle applies to food.
- Every day, people worldwide get sick from the food or drink they consume. Bacteria, viruses, and parasites found in food can cause food poisoning.
- There is no immediate way of telling if food is contaminated because you cannot see, taste, or smell anything different from the norm.
- Food poisoning can lead to gastroenteritis and dehydration or potentially even more serious health problems such as kidney failure and death.
- This risk is especially significant for those in the high-risk category: Small children/ babies, pregnant moms, the elderly, and immunocompromised, especially HIV infections and cancer patients.
- Food hygiene and safety prevent germs from multiplying in foods and reaching dangerous levels.
- Ensures daily healthy family living.
- Keeping one healthy and preventing the additional cost of buying medication and medical check-ups. This is especially important in business. Companies worldwide lose Billions of Dollars per year due to staff downtime.
- Hand washing accounts for 33% of all related food poisoning cases. It is therefore important to maintain good personal hygiene practices. This is something we are taught early in our childhood, yet hand washing is still a critical problem in the kitchen