Background
We make many decisions in our lives and we weigh the
benefits against the drawbacks. Our decisions are based
on which benefits are most important to us, and which
drawbacks we are willing to accept. Decisions about
what we eat are made in the same way; but when it
comes to safety, our decisions are usually made more
carefully. We need more information to make a wise decision.
We need to know where food comes from, what
it contains, how the animals were raised or the vegetables
grown, and how our government decides which
foods are safe for us to eat. Regulations governing food
hygiene can be found in numerous early sources such as
the Old Testament, and the writing of Confucius,
Hinduism, and Islam. Such early writers had at best only
a vague conception of the true causes of food-borne illness
and many of their prescriptions probably had only a
slight effect on its incidence. Even today, despite our increased
knowledge, “food-borne disease is perhaps the
most widespread health problem in the contemporary
world and an important cause of reduced economic
productivity”. Deciding whether a food is safe or not
is a difficult task. Food can never be proven to be entirely
safe nor entirely hazardous. It can only be proven
to be hazardous to some degree under certain conditions.
While demanding completely safe food is unrealistic,
it is possible to have food in which potential hazards
have been reduced. For years, safety, i.e. the exclusion
or elimination of pathogens from food, has been
studied separately from the prevention of spoilage. In
most countries the legislation has tended to reinforce
this concept. However, from a microbiological-ecological
point of view the two areas cannot be distinguished. In
spite of considerable efforts, microbiological safety assurance
seems as remote as ever, even in advanced countries.
Death, suffering, economic losses and civil claims on behalf
of victims of food-borne diseases are matched by the
economic losses caused by food spoilage.