When It Comes To Food Safety, We’re All Responsible For One Another

Danielle Nierenberg

Danielle Nierenberg

For communities to be nourished, their food supply must be safe to eat. 

This sounds obvious, but it’s worth repeating, because every year, about 1 in 10 people worldwide (or about 600 million people) become sick from contaminated food, and 420,000 lose their lives. About 125,000 of those deaths annually are children under 5 years old—a disproportionate tragedy that comes at the expense of our future. 

And in low- and mid-income countries, US$110 billion is lost every year in productivity and medical expenses resulting from unsafe food, per World Health Organization (WHO) data. Addressing food safety is truly crucial not just to our lives but to our livelihoods, our economic success, and the well-being of every aspect of the food system.

World Food Safety Day, on June 7, is a perfect opportunity for everyone around the globe to recommit to ensuring a safe food supply for all. 

“Food safety is not just about preventing harm,” says Markus Lipp, Senior Food Safety Officer at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. “It is about creating confidence and trust in the food we eat, in the systems that protect us, that protect food safety and in the institutions that serve the public good for safe food.”

So how do we ensure the future of food is safe?

First: Food safety is not isolated—every link along the food chain must prioritize safety. Food safety begins on fields and farms, with healthy soils and positive growing practices, and continues through processing, transportation, cooking, and serving. 

This whole-system approach can be truly transformative. In fact, many of the 200+ diseases “that we know can be carried by food are preventable and sometimes even eradicable,” says Luz María De Regil, Director of the Department of Nutrition and Food Safety at WHO.

Second: We can’t just respond to challenges that currently exist; we have to be prepared to face unprecedented and complex challenges to food safety as the climate crisis worsens. According to the WHO, the changing climate will affect the persistence and occurrence of bacteria, viruses, parasites, harmful algae, and fungi—and the vectors that spread them.

“We’re going to have emerging pathogens coming in, especially given that the climate is changing…microbes like hot, humid, wet environments,” Barbara Kowalcyk, an Associate Professor at the Milken Institute School of Public Health, told me on the Food Talk podcast.

Third: Perhaps most urgently, we need to champion evidence-based policymaking and global cooperation. This year’s World Food Safety Day highlights this, focusing particularly on the “essential role of science in ensuring food safety and enabling informed decision-making.” Now more than ever, we need to devote more resources to scientific progress, international collaboration, and solid regulatory frameworks—not less.

But recent cuts to research funding and staff in the United States by the Trump-Vance Administration, including in food safety inspection labs, are having concerning ripple effects across the globe. Foodborne illness outbreaks could become harder to detect and contain, leading to more people in more widespread areas getting sick, experts warn.

In addition, the dismantling of the U. S. Agency for international Development (USAID) shuttered several Feed the Future Innovation Labs, which brought university research to countries including Kenya, Nepal, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Guatemala to design and implement food safety interventions in poultry production, post-harvest crop storage, farmers markets, households, and more.

So this World Food Safety Day, let’s pay close attention to the WHO’s calls to action, which encourage all of us—policymakers, business leaders, and eaters—to step up. In our own communities, let’s find ways to apply the WHO’s Global Strategy for Food Safety 2022-2030, to ensure that all people, everywhere, consume safe and healthy food. Let’s continue to champion initiatives like GAIN’s EatSafe program and the Codex Alimentarius Commission, which aims to standardize evidence-based food safety protocols in ways that respect local culture.

I often think of something my friend Abdou Tenkouano told me last year. At that time he was the Executive Director of CORAF, an organization in West and Central Africa that uses agriculture to build community resilience, and now he's Director General at icipe, which uses insect science to tackle food security, health, and environmental challenges in Africa.

“This is a global village,” he said. “We are all interconnected, interdependent, interlinked.”

And when it comes to food, we all have a responsibility to keep one another safe.

As always, my personal email is danielle@foodtank.com: Tell me about how you’re rising to the moment and urging policymakers, business leaders, and other food system stakeholders to prioritize science in food safety. I look forward to hearing your strategies and sharing best practices this World Food Safety Day!

(Danielle Nierenberg is the President of Food Tank and can be reached at danielle@foodtank.com)