World Food Safety Day: What It Means For You and How You Can Do Your Part
World Food Safety Day: What It Means For You and How You Can Do Your Part
June 7th marks World Food Safety Day, and we’re serving up all the mouthwatering details of what this day represents.
If there’s one thing that 8 billion people have in common, it’s food.
Food is a staple in every culture you come across—Hawaiian, Chinese, French, Canadian, Senegalese, the list goes on…
Every country puts its own unique spin on the food that’s native to their land. Recipes get passed down from generation to generation. Tourists flock to get a piece of the mouthwatering action.
As much as everyone craves a tasty, homemade dish, there are things that we must keep in mind to ensure it’s safe, healthy, and nutritious to eat.
In this article, we’re giving you the deep dish on the significance of World Food Safety Day, what it means for you and your loved ones, and how you can do your part.
What Does World Food Safety Day Represent?
World Food Safety Day—adopted by the United Nations in 2019—is a day dedicated to “raising awareness that safe, healthy, and nutritious food is everyone’s right”, as Dr. Francesco Branca, Director of the Department of Nutrition and Food Safety, proclaims [1], [2].
This day shouldn’t be taken lightly, either...
600 million people worldwide get sick every single year just from eating contaminated food [3].
420,000 of those people die.
And out of every 5 deaths, 4 of them are children.
This can come from a variety of factors leading up to food landing on your plate. These factors include not washing your hands before handling food, mixing raw and cooked food during preparation, not cooking food thoroughly, not keeping food at safe temperatures, and not using safe water and raw materials.
By remaining conscious of these 5 causes, we can greatly reduce the chances of food getting contaminated with bacteria, viruses, parasites, and toxins, thus reducing the number of foodborne illnesses we see every year.
There are 7 food safety issues in the food market that we see in both developed and developing countries:
- Microbial Contamination
- Chemical Contamination
- Food Adulteration
- Misuse of Additives
- Mislabeling
- Genetically Modified Foods
- Food Past Use-By Dates
These contaminations can take the form of E Coli, Salmonella, and Campylobacter, among others.
What Does Food Safety in America Look Like?
According to US Centers for Disease Control, 48 million foodborne illnesses arise in the US each year.Yes, these illnesses must be recognized and handled carefully, but there is another epidemic plaguing our country…
GMOs, sugar, food dyes, and packaged, processed foods...
Since the introduction of the first ready-made meal back in the 1950s, food safety in terms of health and nutrition has grown bleaker by the year.
GMOs, sugar, and chemicals we can’t even pronounce line our grocery store aisles. The worst part—the vast majority of them are labeled as healthy.
Take Kellogg’s, for example. This $29.7 billion food company boasts on its cereal boxes that it’s a healthy source of vitamin D [4], [5].
So, rather than people just getting 15 minutes of sunshine each day, they’re led to believe that this sugar-filled cereal is their best option for this important vitamin.
It doesn’t stop there, though. Harmful additives show up in yogurt, ketchup, coffee syrups, salad dressings, and a whopping 53.8% of products on grocery store shelves [6]. And they’re not stopping there. The global Food Additives market is projected to reach $59 billion by 2025 [7].
