Is food cooked and served around unhygienic roadsides a health concern?

Cleanliness, as we all conventionally know, is important for healthy living. This applies more specifically to the environment we interact with the most and the things we consume.

A compromise in the cleanliness of our environments or of the food we consume is a sign of a befalling calamity on our health and well-being.

In public life too, there are standards of practice to ensure that we are all safe for the common good. Diseases caused by consuming dirty food are oftentimes quickly transmissible, difficult to control and manage, and can eventually cause death. This is not something new.

In heavily populated business centres and most places on busy roads, there are food vendors who make for handy access to food but also work hard to make a living.

There is evidently poor enforcement of food and safety standards such that the measures enshrined in our policies do not find a twin reflection in the delivery of services by food vendors.

Relevant questions here would be, do they know the health and safety standards, measures, and recommendations? We cannot presume that all people have a basic understanding of food safety and food hygiene.

Also, we cannot assume that basic knowledge of the same is the baseline for standard practice, as public product delivery needs more stringent rules to keep the masses safe, as a simple breach can affect many people at once.

In social media, people tend to make jokes about food prepared in dirty places as the nicest, so funny! There are even countries that are known for being unhygienic when it comes to food, including food served and sold to the public. These jokes are not something to be happy about, as they do not build us as a healthy nation.

With a good supply of water, for example, there should be evidence amongst food vendors that they use water to be hygienic in their food business.

There should be limitations on what can be served for the public and what cannot. This will help to reduce the burden on the hospitals where crowds of Tanzanians flock for merely hygienic-related illnesses. In fact, sicknesses related to food hygiene should be an embarrassment to us as a people.

This is because it is not expensive to prepare and serve food in hygienic conditions. Nonetheless, the government needs to as well improve the public cleanliness in our cities and populated areas.

We don’t need policies and documents; we need practice, education of the people, and more hands at work to help make hygiene the minimum of social discipline and service delivery before everything else.

It is the work of the appropriate authorities to notice and take the initiative to forbid the preparation of food outdoors around unhygienic places and to hold those who violate those restrictions responsible. However, this has to go hand in hand with the creation of better plans for ensuring accessibility and availability of food in those places.

There is a popular bias that eating dirty food makes people's immunity strong. How true can this be? This is patronising situations inappropriately while we see people dying from the same situations. It should be taught to children from an early age that we do not eat dirty food, or with dirty hands, or around dirty places, or in dirty vessels.

According to the Tanzania Bureau of Standards (TBS), “Food producers are responsible for ensuring that the food produced complies with the requirements of the standards set to ensure the safety and health of consumers and to gain market access.”

TBS further admonishes that “food stakeholders should be aware of the hazards associated with the food they produce, transport, store, or sell and the measures required to control those hazards so that food reaching consumers is safe and suitable for use. (TBS: Standards and Food Safety, 3rd June 2022).

Statistics of the repercussions of poor food hygiene are scary. In Africa, 5 years ago, about 137,000 deaths occurred every year due to foodborne illnesses and more than 91 million acute illnesses, 30 percent being children below the age of five. The statistics make foodborne illness a major public health issue on the continent of Africa.

Locally, there is a need to organise awareness programmes on food safety to promote well-being. Illness affects our productivity as a nation as it hinders the manpower from working and also consumes resources in taking care of the sick, while sicknesses like those resulting from poor hygiene could be avoided by simple government-citizens collaboration and consistency in healthy practices for the good of all.

Food is not merely a business but an important aspect of human life and well-being.

Shimbo Pastory is an advocate for positive social transformation. He writes from Manila, the Philippines. Email [email protected], WhatsApp: +639951661979.