Razza 1

Julio Razza

Professor Watson

English 1001

February 25, 2019

Food Safety: Responsibility

Food safety is something many people take for granted. Most people have trust and

confidence in whatever restaurant they go to, assuming just because the restaurant hasn’t been

shut down, or there are no rats around that the food is safe to eat. Even at home, are we educated

enough in school to know when something we cook is safe to eat? Something you may not have

thought about before is how your food is treating during shipping. Are the workers responsibly

handling food and ensuring it maintains safe temperature or doesn’t get damaged the entire

shipping/storing process? How do we even know if our food safety systems put in place from the

FDA and USDA are being ensured for our wellbeing? What about people in countries with no

such systems? We have come a long way in food safety from the past, however we are not doing

as much as we could and hundreds of thousands of people die every year with millions more

getting sick due to improper food safety. There are collective reasons for food safety still being

such an issue. Proper food safety systems are a government responsibility, where businesses

should then lead by example with these systems to others and practice proactive safe storage,

handling and cooking procedures. The system of food safety is a massive machine full of risks

and since we all eat, it affects each and every one of us. To improve food safety standards, we

must work together at the personal level by knowing the risks and staying aware, at the business

level through leading by example and at the government level to utilize and improve the food

safety systems in place.

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Food safety is incredibly important and incredibly problematic to all people in the world,

given that you can get sick or die from poor food safety; particularly those in less developed

countries with little or no government regulation around food safety. Growing up, people tend to

develop certain eating habits around foods they enjoy. Over time you get used to how that food is

supposed to taste or suppose to look like; this is the most basic level of food safety: if you see a

black and brown apple, it’s clearly rotted, and you wouldn’t eat it. What if it was a heavenly

piece of Cane’s chicken pulled out just slightly too quick? You probably wouldn’t notice it was

raw until after you bit through the center of it and looked at it, which by that point would be too

late if that piece of chicken was infected with a deadly disease such as salmonella. The first

example is your own food safety awareness. The second example is you entrusting a restaurant

with your food safety. How about the government agencies that regulate food? Government

agencies play a role in helping prevent the spread of foodborne illness by imposing rules that

businesses must follow. Unfortunately for some people around the world, this is not always the

case.
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Government agencies have a responsibility to protect the public health by ensuring clean

and efficient water, electricity and storage systems. When the government fails to due so, we end

up with the most risk to the public population. Regulating food safety agencies here in the U.S.

are probably well known to most Americans; you have the FDA, USDA, FSIS and more. In

other developed countries you have similar systems and in less developed countries you don’t

have such systems. Joe Whitworth recently explain in an article that “In 2015, the World Health

Organization (WHO) estimated that Africans suffer 137,000 deaths and 91 million acute

illnesses annually from foodborne hazards” (Whitworth). While governance is only one of

several criteria including environment and physical infrastructure, there is a clear need for more

government oversight and regulation. This point is strengthened in the same article by stating

“The annual human capital or productivity loss associated with foodborne illness in sub-Saharan

Africa is about U.S. $16.7 billion, which is more than 300 times greater than the estimated

annual $55 million donor investment in food safety projects” (Whitworth). There is an imbalance

and massive productivity loss due to poor food safety. With this new report it’s clearly the

government’s best interest to establish better food safety systems.

There are a lot of businesses that deal with food, and I mean a lot. It’s up to all those

businesses to get your food to either the restaurant it’s going to be cooked in, or to your plate in

your home while keeping the food safe to eat. The lives of many people are in the hands of these

businesses. Businesses should be leading by example by ensuring proper food safety procedures

are in place and are being held to high standards. Businesses have the obligation to know who

they are buying from, and to purchase from certified and safe vendors only. Standards should not

slip during storage either, if you allow frozen food to defrost during any point and re-freeze it,

you could be creating unsafe food conditions.

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Restaurants have a major role to play in the business side of food safety. You hear all the

time about different larger chain restaurants like Chipotle end up in food safety crises. But just

how do these happen and what can we do the prevent these in the future? Well Chipotle has been

working on that solution since their first outbreak, and they’ve come a very long way. It is up to

the restaurant companies to have good training procedures in place and up to the managers to

ensure these procedures get translated down into effective training. This includes staying home

when sick, cooking food to the proper temp and the creation of a positive restaurant culture.

Our final line of defense for our own bodies is ourselves. We have a personal

responsibility for food safety just as the government and businesses have theirs. If we have the

privilege to be part of the educated world this responsibility is only enhanced. It’s important for

us to know how to properly wash and cook the food we take home from the store or farmers

markets. We must know the symptoms of foodborne illness and stay aware of current outbreaks

in our country so that we don’t contribute to it any more. Clean env/washing hands.
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Works Cited

Foodborne Diseases, edited by Steve Taylor, et al., Elsevier Science & Technology, 2017.

ProQuest Ebook Central,

https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uc/detail.action?docID=4788015.\

Kehres, Amanda. “Frozen Food Safety That Extends From Necessity to Passion”.

FSM eDigest, February 5, 2019.

https://www.foodsafetymagazine.com/enewsletter/frozen-food-safety-that-extends-from-

necessity-to-passion/.

Whitworth, Joe. “GFSP calls for more domestic food safety investments in African countries”.

Food Safety News. https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2019/02/gfsp-calls-for-more-

domestic-food-safety-investments-in-african-countries/