How FoodHQ decides what to publish

FoodHQ does not store pages. It stores individual statements, each with its own source, and assembles pages from the statements it is currently entitled to publish. That distinction explains most of what you will notice about the site.

Every statement carries its own evidence

A statement becomes publishable only when someone has read a specific passage that supports it and recorded exactly where that passage is — a named section, not just a paper. Until then it is held, and it does not appear anywhere on the site.

This is why pages sometimes stop short of the obvious next sentence. The knowledge base very often contains that sentence as an unpublished draft; what it lacks is a source, and an unsourced statement is not published just because it is probably true.

Why some pages are missing

Each kind of page has a minimum number of sourced statements before it is considered worth publishing. Below that line the page still exists internally but is not listed and not offered to search engines. Nothing is hidden because it is inconvenient — the threshold is the same for every page of a given kind, and it is not lowered to make the site look larger.

Uncertainty is shown, not smoothed

Each statement carries an indicator of how well supported it is, and you can expand it to see the source, the exact location within it, what kind of evidence it is, and any conditions the statement depends on. Where the evidence is weak, the sentence itself says so rather than leaving that to a badge you might not open.

Where FoodHQ knows that sources disagree, the disagreement is shown before you expand anything. Contested knowledge is not flattened into ordinary settled fact.

Two different kinds of review

Editorial review is the operator taking responsibility for a judgement — that two terms mean different things, for example, or that one concept is a narrower case of another. It is recorded against a named person.

Safety review is something else entirely, and requires qualified reviewers with relevant professional standing. FoodHQ has no such reviewers, so it publishes no food-safety guidance of its own. Being trusted to make editorial judgements does not make anyone qualified to approve safety advice, and the system treats the two as separate throughout.

Why FoodHQ sometimes refuses to answer

Refusing is a normal outcome here. A statement can be withheld because no source supports it, because the source that exists cannot be quoted from, because the statement needs a professional judgement nobody has made, or because it is a safety matter. In each case the honest result is silence on that point, and the rest of the page still stands.