The month of October 2024 is here and about to exit into historical records.
This month’s article will reinforce the past couple of articles in this blog series by discussing the challenges and solutions to visible and invisible food safety concerns. This is appropriately titled as ‘A revisit of Food Safety Concerns; Invisible Environmental Toxins’
- To address these food safety concerns, the author of this blog was interviewed on World Food Day, 16th October, 2024 and shares his perspectives on ‘street food’ sold on Kenyan streets, especially in informal settlements, which foods are mostly consumed by young people, including GenZs!
- First, what is World Food Day? Here is an outline of what World Food Day is about, including its origin and relationship with the UN agency, FAO. https://www.nrf.org.uk/world-food-day/?gad
- Second, without much ado, here is a self-explanatory interview of Dr. Peter Mokaya, the blog author, conducted by Aidah Muzantsi, a health journalist cum blogger. Enjoy!
- After watching the video interview, what other food safety concerns come to mind?
- One of the invisible environmental toxins in foods, including ‘street food’ is the presence of pesticide residues in foods grown in soils contaminated with herbicides and sprayed with pesticides, especially those containing glyphosate aka Roundup Weed killer. This is a tasteless and invisible water-soluble environmental contaminant of both local and global proportions!
- Glyphosate based herbicides (GBH) and pesticides are leading environmental contaminants that have been touted by agro-chemical industry sponsored scientists and academics as being ‘harmless’. This narrative could not be further from the truth. The truth is that glyphosate aka Roundup, packaged as GBH, is a major invisible environmental toxin, that, among other foods, is in the ‘smoocha’ described in the video interview (see earlier).
- Leveraging on previous documented evidence, this blog series has over the years provided overwhelming evidence of the insidious nature of this invisible toxin that causes harm to the soils, water bodies, plants, animals and of course, humans.
- For those who are interested to dig deeper and understand the why, what, where and how these invisible toxins are food safety and environmental concerns, read this book: The author of this blog wrote the introductory chapter(Chapter 1).
- https://www.routledge.com/Synthetic-Pesticide-Use-in-Africa-Impact-on-People-Animals-and-the-Environment/Wilson-Huber/p/book/9781032002828?
- Mmmmmm…are you still there?
- More on this food safety discussion and mitigation efforts in next month’s blog article. Remember to check us out.