Principles of Modern Food Safety. Farm-to-Fork Risk Governance and Control Strategies

Document from the year 2026 in the subject Health - Nutritional Science, language: English, abstract: Food safety is one of the most consequential disciplines in the modern world. Each year, an estimated 600 million people-nearly one in ten globally-fall ill after consuming contaminated food, resulting in approximately 420,000 deaths. These figures, compiled by the World Health Organization, underscore the profound responsibility carried by every actor along the food supply chain: from the farmer tilling the soil to the consumer lifting a fork. This reference book, Principles of Modern Food Safety: Farm-to-Fork Risk Governance and Control Strategies, is designed to serve as a comprehensive, authoritative, and practical resource for food safety professionals, public health practitioners, regulatory officers, researchers, and students across food science, nutrition, environmental health, and related disciplines. It integrates classical foundations-microbiology, chemistry, and toxicology-with contemporary developments in digital monitoring, molecular diagnostics, international regulatory harmonization, and systems thinking. The farm-to-fork paradigm reflects the understanding that food safety cannot be addressed at a single point. Every node in the food chain-production, processing, packaging, transport, retail, and consumption-represents both a potential risk and an opportunity for control. This book is organized to follow that journey, providing both theoretical frameworks and practical tools at each stage. Part One lays the scientific and epidemiological groundwork, establishing who the key pathogens and chemical hazards are, how they enter the food supply, and what the burden of foodborne illness looks like globally. Part Two examines the architecture of modern food safety systems-HACCP, ISO 22000, FSMA, and the Codex Alimentarius-and explains how these frameworks are implemented in practice. Parts Three through Five trace the supply chain from primary prod