The 2030 Agenda cannot be reached without universal access to nutritious food. Every year approximately 600 million people are still ill from bacterial, viruses, toxins, or chemicals-contaminated food, and 420,000 of them die.
Children are unable to learn and adults are unable to function when food is safe. The lack of access to nutritious food, in other words, hampers human growth.
The World Food Safety Day takes place every year on 7 June, to highlight the vital role that healthy food plays in promoting health and ending hunger.
Its purpose is to attract and encourage action aimed at preventing, detecting, and managing risks associated with food safety, public health, economic growth, agriculture, access to markets, tourism, and sustainable development.
Looking for online retailers that sell healthy food in your region? You can check review sites like Collected.Reviews to see other customers’ experience who order food online.
Below are 5 tips for ensuring food safety in the society
1. Grow food safely
Food manufacturers need to follow good practices to ensure adequate global healthy food supplies while mitigating their effect on the environment and climate change adaptation. With food production processes evolving and adapting to changing circumstances, farmers need to think carefully about how to deal with potential risks and how to ensure food is healthy.
Integrating plant and animal health, for instance, may contribute to discouraging antimicrobial resistance and reducing 700 000 deaths annually from antimicrobial-resistant infections worldwide.
2. Keep that food safe
Preventive checks will solve most food safety issues for business operators. All food operating participants – from manufacturing to retail – must maintain compliance with programs such as the HACCPframework, a system that recognizes, assesses, and monitors important food safety dangers.
Aside from reducing the potential for disease, good manufacturing, storing, and preserving practices can also reduce post-harvest losses, helping food maintain its nutritional value, and helping companies to increase their involvement in a global food trade of US$1.6 trillion.
3. Team up for safety
Food protection is ultimately a joint obligation. Governments, regional economic bodies, UN agencies, development agencies, trade organizations, consumers and producers, universities and research institutions, as well as private industry bodies, must work together on matters that affect us.
They must also work together. National, regional and local collaboration is needed – across government sectors and borders, in the fight against foodborne disease spreads worldwide.
4. Perfect your washing technique
Clean your products under running water with a vegetable scrubbing brush and disinfect the microbes on the layer of your products if needed. This helps to physically eliminate any of the products’ potentially harmful bacteria.
5. Ditch out-of-date food
Food producers set expiry dates for consumer protection foods, so review them regularly. There is however no expiration date on certain foods, so be sure to check your food for disputable areas, disagreeable smells, and dark spots. Write down the date and throw it away after 3 days.
Bottom line
Healthy food is ultimately important, not only for improving health and food security but also for every region’s quality of life and economic growth. The stress of healthcare services and damage to national economies, tourism, and trade hamper socioeconomic growth because of foodborne diseases.