Assessing food safety and food hygiene practices among tertiary students

Foodborne diseases are affecting an increasing number of Malaysian due to the lacking of food safety and food hygiene awareness in their daily lives. Hence, this study is aimed to examine the relationship between food safety knowledge and food safety attitudes as well as to determine the relationship between food hygiene knowledge and food hygiene practices among Malaysian university students. Meanwhile, this research is also aimed to evaluate the barriers to food safety and food hygiene practices faced by Malaysian university students. This research involved 209 Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia (UTHM) students from the Faculty of Technology Management and Business (FPTP) who take the course of technology production and operation management. This study used the quantitative approach by distributing the set of questionnaires to the respondents. The results of the study revealed that there was a weak positive relationship between food safety knowledge and food safety attitudes among UTHM students while there was a moderate positive relationship between food hygiene knowledge and food hygiene practices among UTHM students. Besides, the research also discovered that the difficulty to change the long-established behavior was the main obstacle in practicing food safety and food hygiene practices. This study is important in raising the awareness of the students as well as authorities in UTHM from the perspective of food safety and food hygiene practices.