Food Safety in Context and Global Food System – course

Your outcome

Once you have completed the course, you will be able to:

• Explain the interaction between food safety, social, and cultural conditions.
• Explain and discuss the importance of market relations and other conditional factors for food safety and food sustainability.
• Describe the global food system and its relevance for food safety and sustainability.
• Identify the relevance of different actors’ and stakeholders’ for food safety and sustainability.
• Reflect on different actors’ understandings of food, food safety and sustainability and how these affect the handling of food safety issues.
• Analyse food safety issues from a sociological risk perspective.
• Analyse food safety issues from a political and economic perspective.
• Analyse and assess a food safety problem and discuss its development in the context of food systems, markets, risk and differing conceptions and perceptions of safety, sustainability, and risk.

Outcome for your organization

Your organization gets an employee who will be able to:

• Explain how social and cultural conditions may affect the uptake of new food products.
• Understand and analyze specific food-safety issues or conflicts from a sociological, political and economic perspectives.
• Identify important stakeholders and explain why they hold different positions towards specific food safety, food security and/or sustainability issues.

The course is part of the Master’s programme ‘Master of Sustainable and Safe Food Production‘.

You can follow the course as part of the Master’s programme or you can follow it as a single course. Please note, that to get most out of this course, we recommend that you have passed two other courses linked to the Master’s programme. See more under prerequisites.

Part of the Master’s programme

If you wish to follow the course as part of the Master of Sustainable and Safe Food Production, please go to the Master’s programme page and sign up for the Master’s programme.

Single course

If you wish to follow this course as a single course, please sign up by clicking the button ‘Add to basket’ in the top of the page.

Admission

To be admitted to this course, you must:

• have achieved a relevant medium-cycle education (a professional bachelor’s degree or the like) or a long-cycle higher education programme
• have a minimum of two years of work experience in the food science and technology field

Furthermore, you must have a solid foundation in the natural sciences (biology, chemistry, mathematics) as well as an understanding of technical processes in food production lines.

Recommended prerequisites

We recommend that you complete the courses ‘Chemical Food Safety’ and ‘Microbial Food Safety in a Global Perspective’ prior to following this course.

Education session

The course is taught online, the language of instruction is English.

The education sessions consist of e-lectures, Q&A sessions, assignments, casework and a final report.

The e-lectures are available online which means that you can watch them whenever from wherever.

Furthermore, you are offered weekly live Q&A sessions to get in dialogue with the course lecturer and fellow participants.

Course material will be provided during the course (selected chapters from textbooks, scientific articles, popular science articles, newspaper article, reference webpages….).

As part of the course, you will work with a self-chosen case and analyse a relevant food safety issue, its cause, development, and handling. The work will result in a project report.

Exam

The exam consists of your final report, which counts for 100% of the grade and the.

The course is offered in the spring in uneven years (2023, 2025 etc.)