ABSTRACT
Given access to sufficient food, classifications of ill-health arising out of eating problems usually fall into three categories with corresponding literatures, academic disciplines, medical treatments, and policy proposals that rarely intersect with one another. The categories are food contamination, the eating diseases of western affluence, and eating disorders. The first is distinguished by perceiving the consumer as unwitting victim of the failure to provide food hygienically as a result of contamination, broadly interpreted, although the consumer is potentially responsible for failing to preserve and prepare food appropriately. The policy response is to regulate conditions governing the safety of food, to educate the consumer in the acquisition and preparation of food prior to consumption, to treat individual cases of ill-health, and to handle food scares as and when they arise.1
