This webinar from Feed the Future’s EatSafe program explores the critical link between food safety and nutrition. With a focus on enhancing food safety in traditional markets, this webinar emphasises an often overlooked fact: Safe food is essential to ensure consumers can reap its nutritional benefits. In many emerging economies, consumers rely on traditional markets to buy nutrient-dense foods (e.g. animal-source foods, fresh fruits and vegetables) - however these markets often have limited infrastructure and protocols to manage and control pathogens. For food to be safe, it must not cause harm to the consumer when it is prepared or eaten according to its intended use. Unsafe foods can lead to foodborne illnesses and outbreaks, and ultimately impact livelihoods throughout the food system.
Some of the key messages from the webinar are:
- Food must be safe to be nutritious.
- Unsafe food can have short and long term impacts on health, nutrition and livelihoods.
- Food safety is a global challenge, but the challenges are exacerbated in low and middle income countries where traditional markets often do not have the necessary infrastructure, regulations or enforcement to ensure food is safe.
