Food Safety Culture Creating a Behavior-Based Food Safety Management
Food safety awareness is at an all time high, new and emerging threats to the food supply are being recognized, and consumers are eating more and more meals prepared outside of the home. Accordingly, retail and foodservice establishments, as well as food
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Looking Back to Shape the Future
A prescription without diagnosis is malpractice. Socrates (469 BC–399 BC)
Food safety awareness is at an all-time high; new and emerging threats to the food supply are being recognized; and consumers are eating more and more meals prepared outside of the home. Accordingly, retail and foodservice establishments, as well as food producers at all levels of the food production chain, have a growing responsibility to ensure that proper food safety and sanitation practices are followed, thereby safeguarding the health of their customers. Achieving food safety success in this changing environment often requires going beyond traditional training, testing, and inspectional approaches to managing risks. It requires a better understanding of organizational culture and the human dimensions of food safety. To improve the food safety performance of a retail or foodservice establishment, an organization with thousands of employees, or a local community, you must change the way people do things. You must change their behavior. In fact, simply put, often times food safety equals behavior (Fig. 1.1). When viewed from this perspective, one of the most common contributing causes of foodborne disease is unsafe human behavior. Thus, to improve food safety, we need to better integrate the food sciences with the behavioral sciences and use a systems-based approach to managing food safety risk. This book is devoted to providing new ideas and approaches that can help you further improve the future food safety performance within your organization or area of responsibility. But in order to shape the future of food safety, it’s important to understand and learn from the past.
History of Food Production Throughout human history, our existence has been dependant on food. However, how we get our food and produce our food has changed dramatically over the years. Our concern and knowledge about foodborne disease has changed dramatically too. Archaeologists believe that in the early days of human existence, humans primarily hunted and gathered their food. Small social and family groups formed for survival and to hunt, fish, and gather food. After years of small F. Yiannas, Food Safety Culture, DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-72867-4_1, Ó Springer ScienceþBusiness Media, LLC 2009
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2 Fig. 1.1 Food safety equation
Food Safety Culture
Food Safety = Behavior
groups moving from one place to another in search of food, the way humans gathered food started to change. In certain parts of the world more favorable for gathering and cultivating food, humans began to learn how to cultivate crops and domesticate animals and they started to form small villages. Early farming practices became established, which allowed groups of people to live in the same geographic region for longer periods of time. Over many hundreds of years and at the dawn of the 20th century, a significant percentage of the world’s population was still directly involved in farming or agriculture. Many individuals and families would still grow and raise their ow
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