Food Safety Objective: An Integral Part of Food Chain Modelling

Abstract

The supply and maintenance of safe and wholesome foods to a population is a complex system involving mul- tiple stakeholders. An organizational scheme for representing this complexity is a food chain. A food chain also provides the appropriate structure for the management and communication of food risks. A natural extension of this framework is the concept of a food safety objective. The mathematical form of the food safety objective is a mathematical inequality which consistently incorporates a mechanism for combining objective and subjective risk in a single framework. Addi- tionally, the food safety objective mathematical inequality can be adapted to include uncertainty, when information is im- precise or unknown. This extension involves the use of statistical distribution to represent quantitative terms in the expres- sion. Food chain modeling using the FSO framework provides a useful tool for managing the complexity inherent in the supply of safe foods.