Food safety is a scientific discipline describing the handling, preparation, and storage of food in ways that prevent foodborne illness. This includes a number of routines that should be followed to avoid potentially severe health hazards. Food can transmit disease from person to person as well as serve as a growth medium for bacteria that can cause food poisoning. In developed countries there are intricate standards for food preparation, whereas in lesser developed countries the main issue is simply the availability of adequate safe water, which is usually a critical item.

Critics of nation's food safety system say that it is too fragmented and marked by overlapping authority, and they say that may help explain why dangerous foods keep slipping through and why contamination scares are handled in sometimes inconsistent ways.

The Food and Drug Administration came under withering criticism by a House panel yesterday for its handling of recent food-safety violations, and the Bush administration later disclosed plans to establish a working group to review the safety of food and other imports.

While USDA regulates only 20 percent of the food supply, it gets two-thirds of food-safety budget and has ten times the number of inspectors as FDA. FDA regulates 80 percent of the food supply, and these products cause the lion’s share of food safety problems. “During the last few years, the Secretary of Agriculture has spent far more time trying

At least nine people are thought to have suffered food poisoning from a buffet at a staff training day - at Sweden's National Food Administration in Uppsala. There could have been something dodgy in the mussels. But it could also have been caused by poor food handling or refrigeration.