Mankind has long recognized the importance of food availability for survival and wellbeing: It is the concept of food security. Not surprisingly, this concept has been captured by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,¹ adopted by the United Nations in 1948, where food availability is identified as a basic human right. However, it is extremely surprising that the concept of food safety, that is the absence of health and life-damaging or destroying properties, has not been emphasized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Neither has it been mentioned 30 years later in the Health for All/Primary Health Care (PHC) paradigm² that was promoted by the World Health Organization (WHO).
One of the basic components of PHC refers explicitly to the “promotion of foodsupply and proper nutrition.” The masterminds behind the PHC paradigm must have felt at the time that the notion of safe food was implicit, not explicitly referring to the promotion of safe food supply. This implicitly turned out, however, to be a very unfortunate omission and the correction of it had to wait yet another 14 years. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)/WHO International Conference on Nutrition,³ in 1992, was the first major intergovernmental event that referred explicitly to safe food and declared the “access to nutritionally adequate and safe food as a right of each individual.” (Emphasis added.)