Eating food is one of the most important needs of every person, so their safety and quality should be crucial for everyone. People expect, that food they eat is hygienically and health safe. Unfortunately, people usually start to focus on food safety only when various food scandals are exposed and it is too late. Mass consumption of food is the cause of a high risk to human health, but only in the case of harmful food. Food-borne diseases are a common and widespread phenomenon in all parts of the world, regardless of the economic development of the country. Protection of human, animal and plant health is one of the main economic priorities of each country. The political objective of the European Union is therefore to ensure that European Union citizens have access to safe and nutritious foods, so it must meet strict safety standards. In ensuring food safety, it is necessary to take into account all aspects of the food production chain as a whole, because each subject can have a potential impact on food safety. This paper deals with the issues of food safety and food quality. The main objective was to find out how consumers perceive higher quality food and whether they read information included on the food packaging. Primary data were obtained from a survey that was conducted on the sample of 478 respondents living in Slovakia. For a deeper analysis, several assumptions, which were verified by Friedman Test, Chi-Square Test of Independence, Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test, were formulated. The survey has found out that 84% of respondents buy higher quality food and 60% purchase them because of health-related reasons. More than half of respondents search for the information about food safety on the Internet and the same percentage considere government as the most reliable source of information about food safety. Unfortunately, just more than one quarter of them read the information on food label and for 34% is this information unsufficient.

Food industry along with agriculture constitute a major economy sector in most countries, because in addition to water intake and oxygen availability, food is another basic determinant for functioning of the human organism. For the proper functioning of human body, it is imperative that the customer chooses food so that the daily diet includes all the necessary nutrients in a reasonable proportion. At present, however, it is becoming more and more common that foodstuffs do not meet strict standards, are not properly stored, the packaging is damaged, or hygiene standards are not being adhered to, and therefore, in addition to health benefiting substances, they also contain harmful ones. According to the World Health Organization, the death of up to 2 million people a year around the world is caused by foods harmful to human health. The main objective of this report was to assess how consumers perceive the health safety of food in Slovakia and to find out whether some types of food are considered as potentially harmful to health. Primary data were obtained through a questionnaire survey conducted from October to December 2017 on a sample of 478 respondents. Respondents answered to 12 factual, and 9 classification questions, which were consequently analyzed using the Friedman test, Nemenyi test and Chi-Square test of Independence. Survey results showed that the majority of respondents had concerns about the health harming effects of food only occasionally and they trust the hygienic level of the restaurant facilities (60.5%), fast food (53%) and frozen food (49.2%) with few reservations. As the most hazardous foods are considered poultry meat, eggs and mayonnaise. If the consumer's health is endangered by food, the guilty party should be punished by ban (61.9%) or by suspension (19.5%).

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