EU-backed researchers make food safety training fun. Their online cooking game increases consumer awareness of safe food handling while training them to engage in risk-reducing behaviour.
Have you ever wondered how many people fall ill from the food they have eaten? In Europe, it is 23 million every year, and up to 30 % of these cases can be blamed on unhygienic food preparation at home. An online cooking game developed as part of the EU-funded SafeConsumE project not only informs consumers about how to handle food safely, it also trains them to do so.
Researchers from Denmark, Norway and the United Kingdom designed their game-based online intervention to promote food safety awareness and behaviour that lowers risk. They conducted an experiment in which all participants started by answering a questionnaire on their food hygiene habits, how effective they thought certain food safety measures were and their views on various myths linked to food safety. Besides the control group that had no interventions, another group of participants then watched a 2-minute informational video about food safety and a third group watched the video and then played a home cooking computer game requiring them to prepare four meat dishes. The fourth and final group was identical to the third group, except that the informational video was replaced with a version whose pictures aimed to trigger disgust. Seven days later, all participants were asked to complete another questionnaire about food safety habits and knowledge.The researchers found that all interventions improved food safety beliefs to a similar extent relative to the control group. However, despite their positive impact on food safety beliefs, the videos failed to significantly affect behaviour – something that a short duration of gameplay succeeded in doing. “By asking participants questions about their food safety related knowledge and their food handling behavior we could see that participants became more aware of how to ensure that food is safe and that they changed their cooking routines in line with the behaviors they had been given points for in the game,” states Prof. Alexander K. Koch of SafeConsumE project partner Aarhus University, Denmark, in a press release posted on the project website. Prof. Koch is a co-author of the relevant study published in the journal ‘Food Control’.
A total of 1 087 participants aged 20 to 50 and an additional 886 up to 89 years of age took part in the survey. To the research team’s surprise, the study showed that the game did not only have an impact on the food safety behaviour of 20 to 30 year olds, but on older people, too. “Prior to the study, we had expected that the commitment to participate and playing the online game was greatest among young people. Surprisingly, it turned out that the effects that we found were remarkably stable across the different age groups,” remarks co-author Nina Veflen of Norwegian food research institute and SafeConsumE project coordinator Nofima in the press release.
Inexpensive to launch on a large scale once developed, the SafeConsumE (SafeConsumE: Safer food through changed consumer behavior: Effective tools and products, communication strategies, education and a food safety policy reducing health burden from foodborne illnesses) game could play an important role in preventing food-borne disease by reaching many consumers. Prof. Koch concludes: “What is great about the SafeConsume game is that it helps people learn about food safety while having some fun.”
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