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 multiple 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. Additionally, the food safety objective mathematical inequality can be adapted to include uncertainty, when information is imprecise or unknown. This extension involves the use of statistical distribution to represent quantitative terms in the expression. Food chain modeling using the FSO framework provides a useful tool for managing the complexity inherent in the supply of safe foods.

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