Just how food safe are we?
Eating has become a very complicated process, writes Sarah Cefai, who outlines ways to make sure food-borne illnesses are prevented
After watching a video covering all the basic points of food hygiene in the kitchen, a slightly overenthusiastic food safe "trainer" instructs us lowly waiting staff as to the merits of keeping clean (and the lawsuits that may ensue should one of us haphazardly forget to wash our hands following a sneeze). To be fair, it was a morning off from waiting tables, and, given the choice, I'd rather be served by overly conscientious waiting staff, afflicted as they are by an obsessive compulsion towards washing hands, than someone who looks like they could use a clean.
The rhetoric of food safety training all seems fairly understandable in the light of the increasing role that food plays in the spread of illness and disease. The question of food safety not only concerns what we do in our own kitchens, but the sustainability of global health.
In the words of the World Health Organisation (WHO) "food-borne diseases are a widespread and growing public health problem, both in developed and developing countries." Plantation economies and trades in food more generally have marked relations between countries for centuries. But never before has the sunshine-vegetable-animal food chain been so complicated by the infrastructural geometries of agribusiness. It is within the context of this unprecedented degree of globalisation in the economy of food and drink that food has gained such cultural currency and developed into such a potential health risk.
According to the WHO, "the food production chain has become more complex, providing greater opportunities for contamination and growth of pathogens. Many outbreaks of food-borne diseases that were once contained within a small community may now take on global dimensions." Whereas food safety may once have been conceptualised only in terms of kitchen hygiene, it now holds the potential to explode into public crises, as the movement of food stuffs from location to location intensifies in both frequency and scale.
The recent outbreak of a vaccine strain of foot and mouth on a Surrey farm in the UK was likely caused by contamination from the Institute for Animal Health in Pirbright where research into the development of such a vaccine was taking place. This attests to the interwoven complexity of the human, biological and industrial systems that underlie the vulnerability of agricultural life. There is, of course, a certain irony to this speculation; that it was through the efforts of an EU funded project to combat the risk of the disease, that it in fact spread.
At the same time, the devastating effects of adverse weather conditions across Europe this summer - flooding in the north and extreme heat and drought in the south - remind us of the innate dependency of all food production on the climate. A global climate that is itself increasingly a site of speculation; unlike the laboratory in Surrey, containment of the climate's erratic patterns involves a rather more complex and political question of control.
Eating has become a complicated process. With the help of many an advertising campaign, the science of digestion is now popularly imagined as the science of diet. Apparently, oil is good for us when it's rich in Omega 3, though only in small doses (sorry folks, chips are still unhealthy no matter what they're fried in); avocadoes are a good fat; carbohydrates are good when they're complex, but not when simple (sometimes the same applies to people); baked beans are a super food; cereal assists weight loss (if that's all you eat); bacteria can be either good or bad... and the list goes on. These are just simple examples; really understanding food now involves understanding highly complex chemical processes and the use of many words that most of us will not understand.
Unfortunately for us, this explosion in terminology around the science of food has not come about simply with the aim of developing more technological food manufacturing or the latest fad in science-based diets. Food is also receiving attention because of the global impact of food-borne illnesses.
Each year millions of people are made ill by food-borne diseases. It is difficult to speak accurately in statistical terms as most cases of food poisoning are not recorded by a medical practitioner such as the family doctor. I would hazard a guess, though, that most of us will be victim to a nasty bout of diarrhoea, vomiting or abdominal pain - to name just a few recognisable symptoms - at some point in our lives. All too frequently, what we eat comes back to remind us that our bodies are viscerally susceptible to the many affects of food which are not detectable by the naked eye.
There are some very pressing concerns.
According to the WHO, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) or "mad cow disease", linked to the development of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), had affected 119 people, mostly in the UK, by 2002. Sufferers of vCJD may first experience psychiatric or behavioural symptoms, such as depression, social withdrawal and anxiety, which then leads on to neurological symptoms such as dementia, increasing lack of coordination and involuntary movements. The condition gets progressively worse. I can still recall horrifying news images from the 1990s; there was a palpable fear of going mad: Would all beef-eaters suffer in years to come? Could it just be too early to realise the full implications of the disease for the entire population? Understandably, this scare was shrouded in paranoia.
We know now that eating beef is not the problem, so much as cows being fed their own kind. The use of ruminant bone and meat meal as feed supplement for cattle, which no doubt suited profit margins of the cattle industry at the time, was revealed to be the cause of BSE and vCJD in humans. When the impact of such changes in agricultural practices can be so devastating, it really brings home the issue of responsibility - at the level of government policy as well as individuals and corporations - and the need for those involved in the production of food to take a vigilant approach towards the potential hazards posed to animal and human life by unsafe methods of food production.
More germane at the moment is the looming bird flu crisis, which has already killed at least 65 people in four Asian nations, and has been traced in birds as far a field as Canada, Cambodia and Romania. Statistically speaking, 65 people may not sound like many, but as a reminder of the potential impact of such a virus, we might do well to remember that from 1918 to 1919, the Spanish flu, which is now thought to have come from birds, killed 40 million people in a matter of months. While we have better drugs now, viruses are difficult to defeat; they evolve quickly and react to our efforts to eliminate them. What is the role of agriculture, the taste for poultry, in bringing the lives of birds and people into these consistent proximities?
It is public health scares such as BSE/vCJD and avian flu that have brought about the changes in food safety we see today.
The EU's answer to our fears has been to take an integrated approach to food safety, aligning it with animal health, animal welfare and plant health. It has taken what it calls coherent "farm-to-table" measures, without losing sight, of course, of its own role in "ensuring the effective functioning of the internal market". Let's not forget that almost half of the EU budget is still spent on its Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Food scares don't only pose a threat to health - as the British beef industry is aware, they can have a devastating effect on agribusiness and farming communities.
And what about continuing debates on the use of antibiotics to breed bigger and better animals, and genetic modification (GM) to grow bigger and better crops? There is a serious concern that the use of antibiotics and GM will affect the growth of super bugs in food. Can we anticipate the full extent of the impact of such modern technologies on the safety of our food and agricultural environments?
In 2000, WHO member states adopted a resolution that recognises food safety as an essential public health function. It is remarkable to think that such a resolution had not been adopted by member states before.
Unlike food-borne illnesses that are a result of poor hygiene in the kitchen, bacterial diseases and viruses are a result of an economy of food that the individual consumer has a limited ability to influence. New technologies of food production and transportation have brought new threats to the consumer. And the more that supermarkets control what we eat, the less choice we have in eating otherwise. I suppose what is alarming about the examples cited above is the combination of the scale and severity of affected bodies involved, with the fact that there is actually very little one can do to prevent themselves from being adversely affected.
In Europe and abroad, we are self-confessed, obsessed with what we eat. Many have sought to understand the special relation we have with food (for the dieting industry, the answer would be a veritable gold mine). Even governments, in Australia and the UK for instance, would be interested to know how to stop their populations eating their way into the heavier and heavier league of overweight nations (a league that is placing an increasing strain on providers of healthcare). Obesity is certainly a health issue, but is it a "food safety" issue? Although it would be extremist, damaging and prejudiced to take such a view, I wonder if we are witnessing a profound change in attitudes towards what we eat. I wonder if those who have seen Morgan Spurlock's film Supersize Me would agree.
What we eat matters to who we are and who we want to be. When cooking for one, I am personally guilty of lazy meals, such as a bowl of cereal. Lazy, but healthy (it should be noted, to compensate for the lack of culinary effort). I also do my fair share of "aspirational eating" (I may not have a nice house and garden, but throwing together a gourmet meal gives me the impression of this level of comfort and sophistication). Our dietary choices say something about us.
What could be more Maltese than a plate of freshly baked pastizzi, or home-made ricotta ravioli with tomato sauce, or tuna served with potatoes and tomato and caper sauce? Who couldn't love these flavours and their place at the heart of Malta? Food can enable us to take comfort, in one another, in our memories, in places we have called home. Diet has an identity politics, and one of increasing financial and political worth. But the consequences of what we eat don't stop at filling stomachs and flavouring national identities.
Most incidences of food-borne illness arise from the preparation of food at home. According to my calculations, Department of Health statistics reveal that a total of 1,105 Maltese residents were affected by food poisoning during 2004 and 2005. That puts food poisoning as the "second biggest" cause of infectious disease, just behind chickenpox. As these statistics are determined by reported incidences and food poisoning often goes unreported, it is probably fair to say that food-borne illnesses are the biggest cause of infectious disease on the island.
In order to be safer, it's not necessary to get paranoid about disinfecting left, right and centre. Anyone who has spent any time with young children, for instance, will know that they put all kinds of things in their mouths and don't get sick (although that doesn't mean that children shouldn't wash their hands before eating!). The latest theories even suggest that it is precisely this close contact with different kinds of bacteria that enables them to develop healthy immune systems.
The following guidelines, based on those provided by the UK Food Standards Agency, should suffice in helping to ensure the safer preparation of food and the prevention of food-borne illnesses happening at home.
The rhetoric of food safety training all seems fairly understandable in the light of the increasing role that food plays in the spread of illness and disease. The question of food safety not only concerns what we do in our own kitchens, but the sustainability of global health.
In the words of the World Health Organisation (WHO) "food-borne diseases are a widespread and growing public health problem, both in developed and developing countries." Plantation economies and trades in food more generally have marked relations between countries for centuries. But never before has the sunshine-vegetable-animal food chain been so complicated by the infrastructural geometries of agribusiness. It is within the context of this unprecedented degree of globalisation in the economy of food and drink that food has gained such cultural currency and developed into such a potential health risk.
According to the WHO, "the food production chain has become more complex, providing greater opportunities for contamination and growth of pathogens. Many outbreaks of food-borne diseases that were once contained within a small community may now take on global dimensions." Whereas food safety may once have been conceptualised only in terms of kitchen hygiene, it now holds the potential to explode into public crises, as the movement of food stuffs from location to location intensifies in both frequency and scale.
The recent outbreak of a vaccine strain of foot and mouth on a Surrey farm in the UK was likely caused by contamination from the Institute for Animal Health in Pirbright where research into the development of such a vaccine was taking place. This attests to the interwoven complexity of the human, biological and industrial systems that underlie the vulnerability of agricultural life. There is, of course, a certain irony to this speculation; that it was through the efforts of an EU funded project to combat the risk of the disease, that it in fact spread.
At the same time, the devastating effects of adverse weather conditions across Europe this summer - flooding in the north and extreme heat and drought in the south - remind us of the innate dependency of all food production on the climate. A global climate that is itself increasingly a site of speculation; unlike the laboratory in Surrey, containment of the climate's erratic patterns involves a rather more complex and political question of control.
Eating has become a complicated process. With the help of many an advertising campaign, the science of digestion is now popularly imagined as the science of diet. Apparently, oil is good for us when it's rich in Omega 3, though only in small doses (sorry folks, chips are still unhealthy no matter what they're fried in); avocadoes are a good fat; carbohydrates are good when they're complex, but not when simple (sometimes the same applies to people); baked beans are a super food; cereal assists weight loss (if that's all you eat); bacteria can be either good or bad... and the list goes on. These are just simple examples; really understanding food now involves understanding highly complex chemical processes and the use of many words that most of us will not understand.
Unfortunately for us, this explosion in terminology around the science of food has not come about simply with the aim of developing more technological food manufacturing or the latest fad in science-based diets. Food is also receiving attention because of the global impact of food-borne illnesses.
Each year millions of people are made ill by food-borne diseases. It is difficult to speak accurately in statistical terms as most cases of food poisoning are not recorded by a medical practitioner such as the family doctor. I would hazard a guess, though, that most of us will be victim to a nasty bout of diarrhoea, vomiting or abdominal pain - to name just a few recognisable symptoms - at some point in our lives. All too frequently, what we eat comes back to remind us that our bodies are viscerally susceptible to the many affects of food which are not detectable by the naked eye.
There are some very pressing concerns.
According to the WHO, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) or "mad cow disease", linked to the development of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), had affected 119 people, mostly in the UK, by 2002. Sufferers of vCJD may first experience psychiatric or behavioural symptoms, such as depression, social withdrawal and anxiety, which then leads on to neurological symptoms such as dementia, increasing lack of coordination and involuntary movements. The condition gets progressively worse. I can still recall horrifying news images from the 1990s; there was a palpable fear of going mad: Would all beef-eaters suffer in years to come? Could it just be too early to realise the full implications of the disease for the entire population? Understandably, this scare was shrouded in paranoia.
We know now that eating beef is not the problem, so much as cows being fed their own kind. The use of ruminant bone and meat meal as feed supplement for cattle, which no doubt suited profit margins of the cattle industry at the time, was revealed to be the cause of BSE and vCJD in humans. When the impact of such changes in agricultural practices can be so devastating, it really brings home the issue of responsibility - at the level of government policy as well as individuals and corporations - and the need for those involved in the production of food to take a vigilant approach towards the potential hazards posed to animal and human life by unsafe methods of food production.
More germane at the moment is the looming bird flu crisis, which has already killed at least 65 people in four Asian nations, and has been traced in birds as far a field as Canada, Cambodia and Romania. Statistically speaking, 65 people may not sound like many, but as a reminder of the potential impact of such a virus, we might do well to remember that from 1918 to 1919, the Spanish flu, which is now thought to have come from birds, killed 40 million people in a matter of months. While we have better drugs now, viruses are difficult to defeat; they evolve quickly and react to our efforts to eliminate them. What is the role of agriculture, the taste for poultry, in bringing the lives of birds and people into these consistent proximities?
It is public health scares such as BSE/vCJD and avian flu that have brought about the changes in food safety we see today.
The EU's answer to our fears has been to take an integrated approach to food safety, aligning it with animal health, animal welfare and plant health. It has taken what it calls coherent "farm-to-table" measures, without losing sight, of course, of its own role in "ensuring the effective functioning of the internal market". Let's not forget that almost half of the EU budget is still spent on its Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Food scares don't only pose a threat to health - as the British beef industry is aware, they can have a devastating effect on agribusiness and farming communities.
And what about continuing debates on the use of antibiotics to breed bigger and better animals, and genetic modification (GM) to grow bigger and better crops? There is a serious concern that the use of antibiotics and GM will affect the growth of super bugs in food. Can we anticipate the full extent of the impact of such modern technologies on the safety of our food and agricultural environments?
In 2000, WHO member states adopted a resolution that recognises food safety as an essential public health function. It is remarkable to think that such a resolution had not been adopted by member states before.
Unlike food-borne illnesses that are a result of poor hygiene in the kitchen, bacterial diseases and viruses are a result of an economy of food that the individual consumer has a limited ability to influence. New technologies of food production and transportation have brought new threats to the consumer. And the more that supermarkets control what we eat, the less choice we have in eating otherwise. I suppose what is alarming about the examples cited above is the combination of the scale and severity of affected bodies involved, with the fact that there is actually very little one can do to prevent themselves from being adversely affected.
In Europe and abroad, we are self-confessed, obsessed with what we eat. Many have sought to understand the special relation we have with food (for the dieting industry, the answer would be a veritable gold mine). Even governments, in Australia and the UK for instance, would be interested to know how to stop their populations eating their way into the heavier and heavier league of overweight nations (a league that is placing an increasing strain on providers of healthcare). Obesity is certainly a health issue, but is it a "food safety" issue? Although it would be extremist, damaging and prejudiced to take such a view, I wonder if we are witnessing a profound change in attitudes towards what we eat. I wonder if those who have seen Morgan Spurlock's film Supersize Me would agree.
What we eat matters to who we are and who we want to be. When cooking for one, I am personally guilty of lazy meals, such as a bowl of cereal. Lazy, but healthy (it should be noted, to compensate for the lack of culinary effort). I also do my fair share of "aspirational eating" (I may not have a nice house and garden, but throwing together a gourmet meal gives me the impression of this level of comfort and sophistication). Our dietary choices say something about us.
What could be more Maltese than a plate of freshly baked pastizzi, or home-made ricotta ravioli with tomato sauce, or tuna served with potatoes and tomato and caper sauce? Who couldn't love these flavours and their place at the heart of Malta? Food can enable us to take comfort, in one another, in our memories, in places we have called home. Diet has an identity politics, and one of increasing financial and political worth. But the consequences of what we eat don't stop at filling stomachs and flavouring national identities.
Most incidences of food-borne illness arise from the preparation of food at home. According to my calculations, Department of Health statistics reveal that a total of 1,105 Maltese residents were affected by food poisoning during 2004 and 2005. That puts food poisoning as the "second biggest" cause of infectious disease, just behind chickenpox. As these statistics are determined by reported incidences and food poisoning often goes unreported, it is probably fair to say that food-borne illnesses are the biggest cause of infectious disease on the island.
In order to be safer, it's not necessary to get paranoid about disinfecting left, right and centre. Anyone who has spent any time with young children, for instance, will know that they put all kinds of things in their mouths and don't get sick (although that doesn't mean that children shouldn't wash their hands before eating!). The latest theories even suggest that it is precisely this close contact with different kinds of bacteria that enables them to develop healthy immune systems.
The following guidelines, based on those provided by the UK Food Standards Agency, should suffice in helping to ensure the safer preparation of food and the prevention of food-borne illnesses happening at home.