Food safety from consumer perspective: health safety

Jozef Golian,Alexandra Andocsová,Jozef Palkovič,Ľudmila Nagyová,Peter Zajác

doi:10.5219/917

Abstract

 Food industry along with agriculture constitute a major economy sector in most countries, because in addition to water intake and oxygen availability, food is another basic determinant for functioning of the human organism. For the proper functioning of human body, it is imperative that the customer chooses food so that the daily diet includes all the necessary nutrients in a reasonable proportion. At present, however, it is becoming more and more common that foodstuffs do not meet strict standards, are not properly stored, the packaging is damaged, or hygiene standards are not being adhered to, and therefore, in addition to health benefiting substances, they also contain harmful ones. According to the World Health Organization, the death of up to 2 million people a year around the world is caused by foods harmful to human health. The main objective of this report was to assess how consumers perceive the health safety of food in Slovakia and to find out whether some types of food are considered as potentially harmful to health. Primary data were obtained through a questionnaire survey conducted from October to December 2017 on a sample of 478 respondents. Respondents answered to 12 factual, and 9 classification questions, which were consequently analyzed using the Friedman test, Nemenyi test and Chi-Square test of Independence. Survey results showed that the majority of respondents had concerns about the health harming effects of food only occasionally and they trust the hygienic level of the restaurant facilities (60.5%), fast food (53%) and frozen food (49.2%) with few reservations. As the most hazardous foods are considered poultry meat, eggs and mayonnaise. If the consumer's health is endangered by food, the guilty party should be punished by ban (61.9%) or by suspension (19.5%).

Highlights

Growing concerns with the application of highly toxic pesticides and the growing world demands for food direct our attentions to the food safety as well as to the global arrangement of food production (Dou et al, 2015)
The first factual question asked in the questionnaire was whether the respondent had any concerns when purchasing food that it might be harmful to the health (Figure 1)
This mistrust might result from the fact that according to the research by Ergönül (2013), up to 34 % of the consumers expressed that they had suffered from food-borne originated stomach ache, whereas the ratio was 30 % for the consumers who had suffered from food-borne diarrhea in the past

Summary

Introduction

Growing concerns with the application of highly toxic pesticides and the growing world demands for food direct our attentions to the food safety as well as to the global arrangement of food production (Dou et al, 2015). Population as a whole, individuals and households as self clear-cut social groups, which buy products for their personal consumption create the consumer market. Even global consumers are nowadays more concerned about the safety of food products because of a series of food scandals that have been occurred over the last decade and because of the fact that they have not seen signs of decreasing the frequency of occurrence of food scandals (Loc, 2006). It is important to direct the attitudes of man and whole society towards the rational consumption and nutrition of the individual types of food, in order to make food production and consumption more efficient and reduce the threat to the health of the population by civilization diseases caused by improper nutrition (Holienčinová, 2013)

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Conclusion