Food Hygiene and Applied Food Microbiology
in an Anthropological Cross Cultural Perspective

Food safety is a multidisciplinary scientifi c discipline that is specifi cally designed to
prevent foodborne illness to consumers. It is generally assumed to be an axiom by
both nonprofessionals and professionals alike that the most developed countries,
through their intricate and complex standards, formal trainings and inspections, are
always capable of providing much safer food items and beverages to consumers as
opposed to the lesser developed countries and regions of the world. Clearly, the
available data regarding the morbidity and the mortality in different areas of the
world confi rms that in developing countries, the prevalence and the incidence of
presumptive foodborne illness are much greater. However, other factors need to be
taken into consideration in this overall picture: First of all, one of the key issues in
developing countries appears to be the availability of safe drinking water, a key element in any food safety strategy. Second, the different availability of healthcare
facilities, care providers, and medicines in different parts of the world makes the
consequences of foodborne illness much more important and life threatening in
lesser developed countries than in most developed countries. It would be therefore
ethnocentric and rather simplistic to state that the margin of improvement in food
safety is only directly proportional to the level of development of the society or to
the level of complexity of any given national or international standard. Besides standards and regulations, humans as a whole have evolved and adapted different strategies to provide and to insure food and water safety according to their cultural and
historical backgrounds. Our goal is to discuss and to compare these strategies in a
cross- cultural and technical approach , according to the realities of different socioeconomic, ethnical, and social heritages.