Assessment of Food Safety Knowledge, Beliefs and Attitudes of Undergraduate Students at a Kenyan University: Results of an Online Survey

A descriptive, cross-sectional survey was conducted using an online questionnaire to assess food safety knowledge, beliefs and attitudes among Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology undergraduate students. A total of 329 learners consented to participate in the study. The results revealed that overall respondents answered 46.2% of the food safety knowledge questions correctly with similar scores across the five colleges (Agriculture and Natural Resources 47.4%, Human Resource and Development 45.2%, Engineering and Technology 46.7%, Health Sciences 45.4%, and Pure and Applied Sciences 46.5%). Over 70% of respondents seemed to have positive beliefs and attitudes in most of the food safety beliefs and attitudes statements. A 78.7% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that food safety knowledge is important to them while 72.1% and 77.7% of the respondents were willing to learn how to make their food safe to eat, and how to prevent food poisoning from occurring respectively. Only a small proportion (3.3%) of respondents felt that food safety was not their responsibility. The areas of most concern in food safety knowledge were in regard to cross-contamination and temperature control/food preservation. The proportions of correct responses on; “Imagine that your electricity went off and the meat, chicken, and/or seafood in your freezer thawed and felt warm. To prevent food poisoning, what should you do?”, “A refrigerator has three shelves, on which shelf do you think raw meat should be placed?” and “What should be done if the leftovers are still not eaten completely?” were 7.3%, 24% and 24.6% respectively. These results show that students who participated in this study generally had unsatisfactory food safety knowledge regardless of their study category. There is therefore a need to offer food safety education/training to all learners, perhaps in short courses forms and not only on theory, but also on practical food safety aspects to bridge the food safety information gap.