Introduction: Ensuring the food safety is a part of ensuring public health. Home-made food is an important factor in risking consumer’s health, proves European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), saying that the majority (40,5%) of poisonings connected to food in 2018 happened in domestic environment. Consumers access information about food safety, safe food preparation, risks for transfer and development of infection and diseases connected to food, in different ways. Very often and sometimes subconsciously consumers rely on mass media, which have an important role in informing people and enabling them to find information and making connections. Objective: The objective of this master’s degree is to establish in what way Slovenian TV cooking shows depict elements of food safety and to further find out how to improve the conditions in case mistakes are discovered. Methods: 40 episodes of 4 Slovenian cooking shows have been watched with the use of method of systematic observation without intervention. A grading sheet with previously determined criteria for observation has also been used. The criteria has been created based on previous foreign researches and professional recommendations by National Institute of Public Health (NIJZ) both about safe handling of food. The method has also been validated before the research was carried out.
Results: The majority of mistakes and deviations was perceived in the field of personal hygiene, preventing cross contamination, thermal treatment and storing food. The results are comparable to European cooking TV shows. On average, amateur cooks made 2 mistakes per minute, while professional chefs made 1,3 mistakes per minute. Discussion and conclusion: This thesis proves that practices of ensuring food safety that are shown in Slovenian cook shows often deviate from advised norms and are comparable to European cooking TV shows. Many imperfections can be seen, though they could be improved by a different concept of the show.
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