Food Safety

Improved nutrition and health may follow from increasing cases of healthful foods, which includes fruits and vegetables. Food can transmit pathogens such as bacteria and viruses, which may cause death or illness of a person. Food safety, therefore, entails the preparation and storage of foods in ways that prevent food-borne illnesses. These include several routines that should be followed to prevent potential health hazards. This paper, therefore, discusses the alternative food system.

Farmer’s market and community-supported agriculture(CSA) helps in enhancing the development of the social economy and strengthening of local food systems. Farmers market refers to a common area where several farmers gather to sell a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables directly to consumers. According to Ortega and Tschirley (2017), the emergence of supermarkets in SSA is increasing consumer demand for food safety. The steps involved in ensuring food safety include:

1. Choosing your food carefully when shopping by checking the dates of packaging, avoiding fruits and vegetables which are bruised or damaged. This helps in ensuring the purchase of safe products
2. Washing your hands with soap and water before preparation, ensure the use of different chopping boards for fresh produce and raw foods, and cooking to the right temperatures which will help in the killing of germs thus reducing illness.
3. Choosing the right storage that helps food retain its nutritional value includes storing raw foods below cooked foods, keeping fruits and vegetables in a dark environment, storing foods in a covered container. This helps in avoiding contamination.
4. Washing your hands carefully with water and soap before eating also rinses the fruits and vegetables before eating this helps in removing soil and chemical residue in them.

Food safety is vital to human beings since it helps in preventing germs from multiplying in foods hence ensures healthy family living, personality factors such as high openness to experience portraits higher fruit and vegetable and lower meat consumption.

References

Ababio, P. F., &Lovatt, P. (2015). A review on food safety and food hygiene studies in Ghana. Food Control, 47, 92-97

Fung, Wang, H. S., &Menon, S.(2018). Food safety in the 21^st century. Biomedical journal, 41(2), 88-95

Ortega, D. L., &Tschirley, D. L. (2017). Demand for food safety in emerging and developing countries: a research agenda for Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Journal of Agribusiness in developing and Emerging Economies.

Sezgin, A. C., &Sanlier, N. (2016). Street food consumption in terms of the food safety and health. Journal of Human Sciences, 13(3), 4072-4083