By: Martina Celegato
Submitted: 2009-07-02 03:13:50 | Word Count: 526
Food safety is a frequently debated and very sensitive theme in these last years. Increasingly we hear cases of food contaminated with toxic agents, or on the packaging there were toxic substances and potentially harmful to our body.
This is particularly painful when we talk about food for children, as the notorious Chinese milk with the melamine. But these things happen not only in China, we can still remember well the scandal of Nestlé powder milk, or the very harmful presence of ITX in tetra packaging.
As we can easily notice, these cases unfortunately happen quite often. To keep prices low, companies accept to produce products or packaging containing not safe agents. In this process there are both foods but also food machinery that has to be periodically checked. But how do we define food safety?
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Food safety is the ability to provide, in a constant and widespread way, hygienic water and food to meet the energy needs that the human body needs for survival and life. In the industrialized countries, then, this primarily means food hygiene. The hygiene and quality of foods depends on several factors, first of all regulatory compliance by producers and suppliers. It is therefore necessary to establish common rules across all UE countries. Over time, food safety has become a political program itself, this procedure can be followed through the evolution of European legislation, which places the focus on food quality and aims to ensure a high level protection of human and animal health.
Food safety is about control of food origin and also the origin of raw materials used in their manufacture. This also implies that the machines used in manufacturing, such as mixers or ovens, have to be always clean and tidy. The quality of food we eat, in fact, depends also on food machines. So it is important that even food machinery must reflect certain quality and hygiene standards. All machines and equipments now have to meet certain international standards to ensure food security at all levels.
The number of machines used in the food industry is very high, every activity or process has its own specific equipment, it is clear that there are various levels at which the contamination could occur. Among these machines we can cite the fryers, grinders, oven, slicers, sausage fillers and many others. The goal of course is that the entire production chain is subjected to strict standards and quality control. But it is clear that it is not enough to check only the final product, but that the total cycle has to be controlled, so it will be easier to trace the origin of the problem, if it were to emerge.
Regulations in recent years have become increasingly severe, the labels of origin on the product make it easier to choose food we trust more, so we hope that our health is always more secure, especially in such a sensitive area as it is food.
