Food safety

Once - when I was young and wild - I travelled through Africa, through areas I would never go to today. Lots of people died in the Sahel drought, hunger terrorised the area. But what I remember most is the lack of toilet paper. There is no escaping that moment when you have to go between the bushes. And then? Exactly. That is why it is a major insult to offer African (and, for instance, Indian) people your left hand. You offer your right hand. The pure hand. A perfect hygiene system.

What do we Dutch do? We take our shoes, with perhaps a bit of dog poop underneath, to the shoemaker and put our fresh spinach in the same bag on the way back. 

150 to 200,000 aircraft are permanently flying above our heads, filled with millions of people who spread all conceivable bacteria and diseases all over the world. Once on the ground, we kiss and hug each other exuberantly. Not a single person washes their hands and face first after a flight. But the next moment, in the supermarket at Schiphol, we see a product on the shelves that is past the expiry date, and we stay far away! Food safety and human behaviour are very far apart. 

We require food manufacturers to have our food produced by sterile Martians. And what do we, as consumers, do? As soon as it costs effort and money, and consumers are to blame, it is a different story. It’s like the CO2 reduction: we all have to do it! Until it starts costing money. That changes things.

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Herman Bessels is architect BNA at Bessels architekten & ingenieurs BV