Food Safety Focus (243rd Issue, October 2026) – Article 4

Learning Food Safety Habits Starts Young: CFS Storybook for Children

There is a saying “good habits start young”. This also applies to food safety, where forming good food safety habits when children are still impressionable goes a long way towards establishing good food safety habits as adults.

With this in mind, the Centre for Food Safety (CFS) has recently published a children's book to promote basic food safety concepts to primary school students. The Chinese storybook is set in a school where the CFS mascots (On and Mui) teach their class food safety basics through lessons and school activities. Their students, Glove Boy, Siu Mai, Raw Meat, Loaf and Chopper, learn about cross-contamination, using separate utensils for handling raw and ready-to-eat (RTE) food, separation of raw and RTE food during preparation and refrigerated storage, proper hand washing and glove usage and how to keep the food preparation area clean.

The full-colour children's book, fully illustrated in comic format, can be downloaded from the CFS thematic webpage “Safe Food at School”. Share it with children and build food safety habits from an early age.