Food Safety and Hygiene At Home

Unsafe food containing harmful bacteria, viruses, parasites or chemical substances, causes more than 200 diseases – ranging from diarrhoea to cancers. According to the report published by the World Health Organization in 2019, An estimated 600 million – almost 1 in 10 people in the world – fall ill after eating contaminated food and 420 000 die every year, resulting in the loss of 33 million healthy life years. According to the same report, approximately 150,000 of 420,000 people who died due to food poisoning are children under 5 years of age. In other words, 30% of those who lost their lives due to food poisoning are children. Even these frightening figures alone show how important food safety is.

Nutrition is the most basic need and the most basic right for a human being to exist. From this point, we can say that consuming safe food is a basic need, a basic right for every human being. Therefore, each employee working in food production has important duties to ensure food safety. It is an important process that foodstuffs are produced in accordance with food safety rules and delivered to consumers without breaking the hygiene chain. This process continues until we buy the foods and bring them to our house and consume them. For this reason, food safety is very important in our home as well as in food factories, food production and sales places.

Studies have shown that approximately 90% of foodborne diseases are caused by microorganisms. 6% of food diseases are caused by chemicals and the remaining 4% are caused by physical factors.

Each food safety management system aims to detect, prevent, eliminate and preserve food hazards that can harm or potentially harm human health. From this definition, we can say that food safety is based on 4 basic principles.

When it comes to ensuring food safety, the rules of hygiene are the same in our home as in the workplaces where food is produced and sold. The only thing that changes is the size of the kitchen and factory, and the difference in equipment used.

The purpose of this course,

How to buy safe food in the supermarket, in the market, what to pay attention to when it comes to food hygiene at home, to give basic information about what we should do to ensure for creating food safety awareness.

For this purpose, I have included all the information you are curious about food safety in this course. I would like to remind you again how important food safety is for a healthy life and healthy nutrition. If you want to learn everything you need to do about food safety, I recommend you to take this course.

If you're ready, let's get started.