BOOKS

Upon first seeing the title, Ensuring Global Food Safety, the reader might expect that this would be a book about traditional food safety, detailing the hazards and control measures involved in food production, processing, and distribution. In fact, this book is nothing like that. Rather, the book’s content is better described by its subtitle, Exploring Global Harmonization. Organized by several founders and principals of the Global Harmonization Initiative (GHI, www.globalharmonization.net), the book extends an important GHI emphasis on food security and the economic and social “right to food” by developing a series of discussions about contemporary food safety issues and the feasibility and necessity of harmonizing a myriad of national food safety procedures and regulations with international standards. The need for such harmonization has been created by the growing global food trade and the increasing difficulty of identifying and controlling unexpected hazards.

Benefitting from the multi-disciplinary expertise of 58 contributors, the book is organized in 24 chapters. Major chapters cover regulations in many countries and procedures such as performance objectives, analytical methods, capacity building, and control of microbiological risks. The last, dealing with the harmonization of regulations for Listeria monocytogenes control, may be a useful model for the harmonization of regulations for additional foodborne microbial pathogens. A wide range of specific issues is covered in additional chapters on antibiotics, mycotoxins, food additives such as monosodium glutamate, food packaging, nanotechnology, novel processes, carcinogens and other harmful chemicals, nutrition, and ethnic foods. Most of these chapters address topics that are not commonly encountered in traditional food safety texts, e.g., the analysis of the carcinogenic properties of foods and applied nutrition. These treatments of atypical issues are benefits for a profession in which most attention to food safety hazards is typically given to microbiological hazards.

This book should be a useful reference for those attempting to harmonize food safety regulations. It should also serve as a stimulus for the growing network of food safety professionals who are involved in emerging efforts to create or restructure national and international food safety organizations, thereby facilitating the harmonization of global food safety procedures and regulations.

Enzymes in Food Technology. Robert J. Whitehurst and Maarten van Oort, eds. Wiley-Blackwell¹. ISBN: 978-1-4051-8366-6.

Fenaroli’s Handbook of Flavor Ingredients, 6th Edition. George A. Burdock. CRC Press LLC and Taylor & Francis Group². ISBN: 978-1-4200-9077-2.

Food Stabilisers, Thickeners and Gelling Agents. Alan Imeson, ed. Wiley-Blackwell¹. ISBN: 978-1-4051-3267-1.

Molecular Biological and Immunological Techniques and Applications for Food Chemists. Bert Popping, Carmen Diaz-Amigo, and Katrin Hoenicke, eds. Wiley-Blackwell¹. ISBN: 978-0-470-06809-0.

Perspectives on Food-Safety Issues of Animal-Derived Foods. Steven C. Ricke and Frank T. Jones, eds. University of Arkansas Press³. ISBN: 978-1-55728-919-3.

¹Wiley-Blackwell; www.wiley.com.
²CRC Press LLC and Taylor & Francis Group; www.crcpress.com.
³University of Arkansas Press; www.uapress.com.