FOOD SAFETY
Where is the fork? The missing link in farm-to-fork food safety strategies Words by Dipon Sarkar
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n 2015, the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimated that one in ten people suffered from foodborne disease, with 420,000 annual deaths globally. Comprehensive strategies to ensure food safety at all stages of production, distribution and consumption, such as farm-to-fork and ‘One Health’ approaches have been identified as possible ways to reduce this burden. Quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA) has been established as an internationally recognised tool for supporting food safety risk management over the entire food chain and providing a scientific basis for decision-making.1 According to Codex Alimentarius guidelines, QMRA considers the microbial behaviour from primary production through to processing, retail and the consumer’s plate (the ‘farm-to-fork’ continuum2) to generate final public health risk estimates. The consumer phase (CP), or ‘fork’ level, is the final step in the supply
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chain, where the consumer transports, stores, prepares and consumes food. In QMRA, this stage is represented by a consumer phase model (CPM), that links the production and retail phases with the ultimate public health outcomes generated by the QMRA model. The CP is unique, as there is a great degree of variability in consumer practices that cannot be enforced by legislation, resulting in reduced interest from food safety professionals in the CP. But consumer risk perception, awareness and practices have been identified as one of the most important interventions for the reduction of foodborne illness. Several foodborne illnesses such as salmonellosis and campylobacteriosis can be significantly reduced by following proper personal hygiene, avoiding cross-contamination during meal preparation and ensuring correct cold storage and heat treatment steps.3 The cultural, social, and geographical differences in food handling behaviour add further difficulty in gathering
representative data, leading to a scarcity in data in CP.4 However, researchers have established the importance of a representative CPM to generate meaningful risk estimates in QMRA,5 as attempts to use a simplified ‘universal’ CPM represented by a constant factor that ignores the variability in consumer practices have resulted in significant over estimation of the final risk estimate.6 Some important data considerations for CPM are food storage time and temperature, preparation practices, risk perception, kitchen hygiene condition, cooking temperature and crosscontamination probability. Among these, food safety risk perception is the most studied area,7 with data from other areas being scarce, geographically limited or outdated. In the absence of this data, assumptions and surrogate data are used to design CPM. For example, recent QMRA studies conducted to estimate the risk of Escherichia
