Investigation of the Knowledge Levels on Food Safety and HACCP of Food Engineering Department Students: Selcuk University Case Study

Abstract

Concept of food safety is described as all precautions to eliminate physical, chemical, biological and all kinds of damages, moreover this concept is defined as taking the necessary rules and taking precautions during the production, processing, preservation and distribution of foods in order to ensure healthy and perfect food production by the experts of FAO, WHO and Codex Alimentarius and in recent years, quality search in all areas of life has continued to show the effects of production and service industry. As a result of these searches, quality systems, which converge create, provide or maintain quality emerged. Whether students are conscious on the reliability of food products or not is a topic that needs to be investigated in order to educate healthy and conscious generations and pay attention to health issues in food production. This research is a case study and it has been planned to determine the level of knowledge about food safety and HACCP in university students. The target population of the study consisted of 400 students studying at the Food Engineering Department of the Faculty of Agriculture at Selcuk University. Randomized sampling method was used in the determination of the students and 208 volunteer students participated in the study (participation rate was52.0%). Research datas were collected by a questionnaire developed by there searchers between May and October 2016. The questionnaire consists of general information about the students and various questions about the students' opinions and information about food safety and HACCP. In the evaluation of the data, SPSS package program was used and the necessary statistical analyzes were performed. According to the results, 165 (79.3%) of the students were female and 43 (20.7%) were male. The mean age was 21.38 ± 1.91 years. Nearly half of the students (42.3%) stated that they did not know the food safety, 33.7% of them defined it as healthy and non-risky food production,11.1% of them defined it as physical chemical microbiologically appropriate food production and 10.6% of the participants defined food safety as the measures taken to prevent production, consumption and storage until they reach the customer and to be free of risks.Among the food security systems; TSE is known by the77.9% of participants, ISO 57.7% of them, HACCP 31.7% of them, EUROGAP 7.7% of them, IFS 3.4% of them. When students are asked about "what is HACCP?" it is seen that 25.0% of the students can make the right definition.

Keywords: Food safety, HACCP, nutrition, university student, food.