Drive to teach food safety to housewives

The Abu Dhabi Food Control Authority (ADFCA) has launched a community initiative 'Salamat Zadkom', to teach housewives and housemaids the basic skills and practices of preparing and handling food so as to prevent contamination and promote food safety at homes.

The course, a part of the Year of Zayed initiative, will be offered at eight accredited training institutes specialising in preparing housewives for the labour market.

Through a six-hour intensive course, the trainee will be introduced to the most important safe practices while handling food at home, which promotes community awareness on food safety issues.

Thamer Rashed Al Qasemi, ADFCA's spokesperson, said the initiative comes within the ADFCA's activities and efforts for achieving food security and sustainable agricultural sector.

"By finding innovative and effective ways for spreading sound food practices, the initiative reflects the authority's role in serving the society."

Al Qasemi added: "Through this initiative, the ADFCA seeks to reach the last element in the food chain, to raise his awareness about the sound food practices to get safe and healthy food. It also aims at helping consumer to avoid contamination and damage of food while handling it at home.

According to the ADFCA, all who wish to participate in the course should register at one of the accredited institutes distributed across the three regions in Abu Dhabi.

"The course will be available in eight different languages - Arabic, English, Urdu, Hindi, Malayalam, Bengali, Ethiopian, and visual language," explained Al Qasemi.

Aisha Mohammed, 27, an Emirati resident in Abu Dhabi, said: "This is really a good initiative and I believe it would promote good safety in homes. I will register my housemaid for this course so she learns the relevant skills on handling food."

Egyptian housewife, Aminah Zainab said she would talk to her husband and see if she can enroll for the course. "Food safety is an important aspect in homes and many people have no professional skills on handling and storing food," said Zainab. "And if such an opportunity for learning good safety practices comes, I would definitely want to be part of the beneficiaries."

Through its close partnership with the private sector, the ADFCA has trained more than 270,000 food handlers at its licensed training centres across the emirate. It coordinated with a number of institutes and training centers and provide them with specialised training materials in several languages, to ease the process of communicating information to all trainees of different nationalities and cultures.