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Globally, foodborne illness is a significant public health challenge. Food safety inspection plays a crucial role in the regulation of food businesses to prevent foodborne illnesses. To be an effective health protection measure, however, food safety inspections must facilitate the thorough evaluation of food safety risks. Our research examined how food safety inspectors from Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK, and the U.S. assessed food contamination control during food premise inspections. Data were collected via an online survey of environmental health practitioners who routinely conduct food safety inspections. The findings indicated that inspectors are generally aware of food safety hazards that can be present at food businesses and have deployed a variety of relevant data-gathering methods to inform their examination of the extent of contamination control. The findings also indicated a prevailing methodological incongruence stemming from the absence of a robust inspection methodology. We propose that these shortcomings be addressed by solutions that are formulated based on established hazard analysis critical control point (HACCP) principles and qualitative field research. The development of a clear and appropriate methodology will support food safety inspections to provide a robust and reliable means for evaluating food safety risk and ultimately reduce the incidence and burden of foodborne illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A culinary revolution in America and elsewhere has recently been pinpointed to around 1963. Three important New Zealand cookery books were published that year, and these are investigated to characterize the worldwide shift. Was "grandma's cooking" lost or "gourmet cooking" gained? Seemingly contradictory evaluations might be reconciled in the light of major changes in the food industry. Good domestic cooks embraced successive modes and also resisted them, primarily by continuing to grow and preserve some of their own food, and then by keeping up the cooking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on processes of agrifood restructuring in Australia and New Zealand. The author analyzes the roles and relationships of the agrifood industries in the Australasia region during a period of major change. The researchers were drawn from a wide range of disciplines, but shared a common interest in the analysis of agricultural change and the impacts of current transformations at a number of levels, global, regional, and local. Unlike the United States, with its land grant colleges and freestanding departments of rural sociology, Australia and New Zealand have put only limited resources into rural-based sociological research, concentrating instead on extension and agricultural economics. The former has gone through a crisis of identity and is much reduced force in an increasingly privatized, "user-pays" environment, while the latter is generally an extremely conservative disciple, marked by theoretical rigidity, which continues to leave people and social relations out of its mathematical models.