Gloria Tawiah's ready-made meals of fufu, banku and rice sell for as little US$ 0.02. For many of the city's poorest people she and other vendors offer the only chance of a square meal. And when customers are short of cash, vendors offer meals on credit. Tawiah is one of thousands of street food vendors in the Ghanaian capital who help to feed travellers, commuters, workers and school children. But despite the importance of Tawiah's role in the local economy and the fact that she has been selling food for 12 years, she attended a workshop on food safety for the first time this year. They taught us how to handle and cover food, what type of food items to buy, said Tawiah, who now has a licence from the Accra Metropolitan Assembly to sell food and who belongs to the Ghana Traditional Caterers Association. It was very useful. Workshops teach vendors to wash their hands before cooking and to disinfect vegetables grown in fields irrigated with dirty water and fertilized with animal faeces. Most of the food served on the streets of Accra is safe. Traditional preparation methods, such as a long cooking time, which sterilizes the food, and lactic acid fermentation, which kills some food spoilage bacteria, already provide protection. But research published in the Bulletin in July 2002 showed that salads, re-heated soups and sauces, and dishes served with bare hands contained high levels of potentially dangerous enteric bacteria. Street vendors like Tawiah in Accra say they were unaware of the dangers until they attended the workshops and could unintentionally have been poisoning some of their customers. Vendors were horrified when we told them that their food was potentially hazardous, said Keith Tomlins, a food safety and quality scientist at the Natural Resources Institute at the University of Greenwich in the United Kingdom. Since 1999, Tomlins has been involved in three food safety studies in Ghana funded by the Crop Post-Harvest Research Programme of the United Kingdom's Department for International Development (DFID). Initially, the work set out to describe the various contaminants found in street food, but the investigation expanded its brief. As our study progressed, we realized that producing a report was not enough and that we also had to engage with stakeholders at all levels to push home our recommendations. Previous studies had little effect because no one heard about them outside the scientific community, Tomlins told the Bulletin. In the first project, Tomlins and his colleagues estimated that there were 60 000 street food vendors in Accra with a combined annual turnover of US$ 100 million. The other two projects have aimed to forge better cooperation between government, regulators and the street vendors themselves: for example, by providing workshops on food safety, personal hygiene and sanitation. …