Food safety knowledge, beliefs and myths: results from an exploratory analysis

Despite the existence of stringent European legislation aimed at mitigating risks associated with improper food handling, consumers may remain uninformed about which post-purchase practices best preserve food quality and safety. Practices in this area may be informed less by scientific evidence than by popular cultural beliefs and “food safety myths”. Understanding how such beliefs relate to consumer food risk management is therefore relevant to public-health communication. This study reports results of a survey administered to a non-probability sample of consumers in a developed country to assess their declared knowledge of post-purchase practices that may reduce food-management risks and to identify individual-level factors associated with this knowledge. The case study focuses on Sicily (Italy), a Mediterranean region whose gastronomic and cultural traditions plausibly shape post-purchase food handling alongside regulatory and general social norms. Main results are consistent with the existence of widely shared misconceptions within the investigated sample, which appear also among more educated respondents and among those who declare to be experts on the topics investigated. Younger respondents tend to show lower declared knowledge than adults. The results also indicate that correct answers across different items tend to co-occur, suggesting that knowledge of different aspects of post-purchase food management is not isolated and may reflect a broader food-safety literacy. The study provides preliminary insights that may inform the design of future targeted risk-communication campaigns.