World Food Safety 2025: Rethinking Risk from Farm to Fork

Each year on 7 June, World Food Safety Day calls attention to the often invisible threats lurking across the food chain. The 2025 theme—“Food Safety: Science in Action”—goes a step further. It doesn’t just ask what makes food safe, but also how: What tools, what systems, what knowledge?

The answers are scattered across fields and forks. Scientific rigour is as relevant in a biosensor lab as in a vendor’s cart or a school kitchen. It underpins the fight against contamination, the push for transparency, and the long battle for climate-adaptive food systems.

This series traces the arc of risk and resilience in India’s food safety ecosystem. It opens with agroecology and land rights, where questions of ownership and sustainability intersect with safety. From there, it moves through wastewater reuse and climate frameworks to explore how upstream decisions shape downstream outcomes. It also examines the economics of food safety, drawing lessons from Japan and confronting the promises and perils of AI and diagnostics. The final leg turns to consumption, where cloud kitchens, ultra-processed foods, reused cooking oil, and informal vendors reveal how safety can slip through the cracks.

The science exists. The challenge is making it act consistently, equitably, and end-to-end. This series emphasises the urgency of rethinking integrated, science-driven solutions that safeguard food across every link of India’s supply chain, from farm to fork.