SYMHC Classics: Astronaut Origins of Food Safety

Happy Saturday. Food safety has been a recurring news topic here in the US over the last several months, and we also have a forthcoming episode related to it. So today we are replaying our episode about the role the Space Program had in the development of formalized food safety procedures. In this episode, we talk about a food recall that was fairly easy to track because of the food manufacturer's record keeping, and we described that as sounding fairly normal.

That might see ironic in the wake of multiple recent food born illness outbreaks in the US connected to produce, in which consumers have not had a good way of knowing whether the produce they are buying comes from a producer connected to the outbreak. The Food Safety Modernization Act, passed in twenty eleven, required rules for meaningful food traceability, including for produce, but those rules were not written until twenty twenty two. The FDA was supposed to start enforcing these rules on January twentieth, twenty twenty six, but industry pushback and budgetary issues have pushed that date until July twenty twenty eight, although some legislators are asking for that to be rescinded. As of when we are recording this also,

there have been major cuts to various government departments and programs involved in food safety under the second Trump administration. This episode originally came out on December fifth, twenty twenty two. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio Hello, and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Lately, a series of things has made me go, I should really do some kind of podcast about food safety. This is not the first time I've had that thought, but it is the first time that the food safety podcast has made it into the pipeline. One was a video that I stumbled over on TikTok in which somebody was recounting their experience of being tracked down by the Health Department because

they worked in food service and had been diagnosed with salmonilla. There were just a whole lot of people in the comments who did not know that if you have salmonella, you can spread it to other people through handling food. So that's a thing that can happen, just as in case folks don't know. There was also a recent episode of the podcast saw Bones on E Coli and Yet Another was a different episode of the podcast Maintenance Phase about a big vegan crumble recall that happened in June.

I'm also just generally interested in this because I spent a couple of years of my early career writing about food safety and sanitation. We have had episodes on the show before that talked about food safety or food contamination in some way way, like prior hosts episode on Harvey Washington Wiley and his poison Squad, or our episode on the Swill Milk scandal of eighteen fifty eight, or our episode on the history of canning. This is more about the development of a more systematic approach to food safety that was developed and has been adopted in a lot of the world. Is kind of the underpinning of food safety systems. It was developed for NASA to make sure that astronauts did not get food poisoning in space. We're

not going to be talking in any kind of graphic detail about what happens when people get food poisoning or anything. But I know that a lot of stuff about food can be complicated for people. So if hearing about a lot of food borne illnesses and spread of disease through food is like a trouble point for you, then this one might be a little challenging. Of course, we need to set the scene with things that happened before the space probe. There have been religious and cultural practices that had some influence on food safety all around the world, likely for all of human history. These include Jewish and Islamic dietary laws, cultural and religious expectations around things like cleanliness and hand washing, and cultural taboos related to which

plants and animals are considered okay to eat. Surviving texts from Egypt to India, China, Greece, and Rome, and oral traditions from other parts of the world all include methods for preserving and preparing food to ensure that it will be safe to eat, and governments have also had an interest in legally regulating various aspects of food quality and safety, going all the way back to the ancient world. A lot of what we're talking about today, though, mostly has roots in the nineteenth century, when multiple factors made food safety into a more international issue. The Industrial Revolution had led to a wave of urbanisationation and industrialization, especially in North America and parts of Europe. The growth of cities

meant that more people were buying and eating foods that had been raised, grown, and processed somewhere else, rather than foods that were mostly local to their own communities. The food system itself also became a lot more industrialized, with more large scale facilities for things like processing and canning.

A lot of this very rapidly growing food industry wasn't regulated in any way, and a push to cut costs and bring in bigger profits led to a sharp rise in things like food adulteration and other problems in a lot of companies. So people were naturally concerned about whether what they were buying and eating was safe and wholesome, and as food imports and exports increased, nations also became focused on whether what they were receiving was high quality.

We talked about this a little bit in our previous episode on butter versus margarine. Authorities in the UK became concerned about whether butter produced in the US was genuine or whether they were getting quote, spurious compounds resembling butter. As another example, in eighteen ninety, Congress made the US Department of Agriculture responsible for ensuring that beef exports to Europe were safe, and an inspection system was set up in eighteen ninety one. In the wake of all of this, international trade organizations also started bringing together different types of food producers, with one of their goals being to ensure quality and consistency of their products. The way that people thought about food safety and purity was also evolving during

this time. A lot of the earliest laws and standards about food safety had to do with visible issues, like animals that were obviously ill, food that was discolored or moldy or adulterated, or processing facilities that were just filthy. But as medical and scientific communities started to accept the germ theory of disease, it became clear that contamination that might make people sick was not necessarily visible to the naked eye. Scientists and researchers started working toward establishing more robust guidelines for food quality and safety, and governments began passing laws incorporating these and other recommendations. For example, an international conference of food chemists and other scientists was held

in Vienna in eighteen ninety one. Afterward, the Austro Hungarian Empire established a Scientific Commission on Food, which led to the creation of a system of food codes known as the Codex Alimentarius Austriacus. Drafting these codes was a time consuming process, and the first edition of the codex was published in nineteen eleven. This was one of the Western world's first comprehensive food codes. Although legislators in the United States started trying to introduce food and drug laws in the eighteen eighties, at first these efforts didn't really go anywhere. Instead, new food regulations in the US have overwhelmingly followed some kind of big crisis or scandal. Prior hosts of the show talked about doctor Harvey W. Wiley's efforts to determine

whether food additives were safe by feeding them to human test subjects, who became known as his poison squad. Although Wiley and others recommended legislation be passed to protect people, and his experiments did get some attention, the thing that really pushed lawmakers to act was Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle, which was published serially in nineteen oh five and then as a book in nineteen oh six. And although this was a novel, Sinclair based it on undercover research that he had done in Chicago's meatpacking plans. Sinclair was really focused on the truly a working conditions in these plants, but when the public read his novel, people were far more outraged by descriptions of them as just revoltingly unsanitary.

For example, one passage described meat soaking in vats of chemicals before it was canned, with leftover scraps being dumped onto a filthy floor and pushed into a drain where they could be caught and mixed back in with the next batch of meat. In response to public outcry, Congress passed both the Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act in nineteen oh six, and these became the first broad consumer protection laws in the United States. Initially, the USDA's Bureau of Chemistry was responsible for enforcing the Pure Food and Drug Acts provisions regarding chemical adulteration. The Bureau of Chemistry would later become the Food and Drug Administration.

The USDA's Bureau of Animal Industry was responsible for inspecting the animals that were raised and slaught for food. These inspections involved looking at, touching, and smelling animals and carcasses so before and after slaughter, looking for signs of disease or contamination. These inspections were conducted on animals whose meat was being sold through interstate commerce. Chickens and turkeys were not inspected because most of the time they were raised on smaller farms and sold nearby, not in another state or another country. The USDA started inspecting poultry farms in nineteen twenty six following concerns about the safety of poultry, but at first these inspections were voluntary. Although most of

this initial legislative focus on food safety was about meat, there were also efforts to reduce the spread of disease through shellfish. It had become clear that oysters and other shellfish could make people sick if they were harvested from water that was contaminated with bacteria. At the time, the most common illness that was spread through shellfish was typhoid, was caused by Salmonella typhi. In nineteen oh nine, the American Public Health Association started working on a way to test the water to try to make sure that shellfish growing in it would be safe to eat. Eventually, people started testing the water for E. Coli contamination, since E.

Coli and salmonella are both spread through feces. The US continued to pass new laws on food safety in response to public concerns, including authorizing the FDA to set standards for quality and fill for canned foods with the exception of canned milk and meat. In nineteen thirty the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of nineteen thirty eight contained multiple new provisions, including ones related to canned food and factory inspections. In nineteen forty the FDA was moved from the Department of Agriculture to the Federal Security Agency, and in nineteen forty nine, the FDA published its first industry guidance, which involved toxic chemicals in food. Congressional investigations into the safety of chemicals

used in foods and cosmetics started in nineteen fifty. By this point, the United States had seen a massive increase in factory farmed, and processed foods, which had really enormously escalated during and after World War Two, and the space race was underway. NASA already took steps to make sure astronauts weren't exposed to any illnesses before they started a mission, but as missions started to get longer, NASA also needed to make sure they were not exposed to illnesses in the middle of a mission that included food borne illnesses and we will get to that after a sponsor break.

One of the many priorities of the US space program was making sure that once astronauts were going to be in space long enough to need to eat there, their food would not make them sick like we talked about with motion sickness in our episode on the Galleon at eleven. Of food born illness in the middle of a space mission had the potential to be catastrophic, putting the lives of the sick astronaut and everyone else on board at risk.

So in addition to having a long shelf life and not producing crumbs that could get into instrument panels or ventilation, the food going into space needed to be free of all potential pathogens. Controlling crumbliness was the easy part. The first foods eaten in space included squeezable packages of purees and liquids and bite sized cubes of solid food with an edible coating to keep them contained. But making sure everything was pathogen free was more difficult. It seemed like the stress of space travel had the potential to make astronauts susceptible to microbes that would be harmless in other circumstances, So the thresholds for what was considered safe were very low.

Another issue was determining that the food really was safe before sending it up there. At first, the raw ingredients and the finished products were both tested, and batches of food that failed the final test were destroyed. Obviously, this was wasteful, and so much finished food wound up being destroyed during and after testing that there was not much left to actually send to space. Also, if only safe ingredients were going into processing but contaminated food was coming out, that suggested there was a problem. Doctor Howard Bauman, who worked at Pillsbury and as a consultant, set of this quote, if we had to do a great deal of destructive testing to come to a reasonable conclusion that the product

was safe to eat, how much were we missing in the way of safety issues by principally testing only the end product in raw materials. He went on to say, quote, we concluded, after extensive evaluation that the only way we could succeed would be to establish control over the entire process, the raw materials, the processing environment, and the people involved.

Establishing control over the entire process was an enormous team effort. Initially, before Balvin got involved, there were two principal players. They were NASA and the US Army Natick Research Development and Engineering Center previously known as the Quartermaster Food and Container Institute. One of the key people involved from NASA was doctor PAULA. Chance, who was NASA's Food and Nutrition Coordinator. On the Native lab side were food technologists doctor Herbert A. Hollander, microbiologist doctor Hahmed Elbissi, and dietitian Mary V. Klika. NASA and the Army also worked with several corporations to actually produce the food, and the primary one that became involved in this food safety effort was Pillsbury. Pillsbury became part of

the team in nineteen fifty nine. At the time, the military was using a framework called failure mode and Effects analysis as a process analysis tool. This essentially involved examining all of the ways a process could fail and analyzing what would happen in the event of that failure. This framework was being used to make sure production of everything from ammunition to medical supplies turned out working, reliable finished products, and to make sure systems and processes went as planned.

The team decided to build on this concept to develop a system to ensure save food for the astronauts, and they looked at the food production process as one in which a single failure meant that the whole system had failed. They ultimately developed a process based on three principles. The first was to conduct an analysis of all the possible has involved in food production. That included evaluating all the ingredients, how those ingredients were combined and processed the final product, how that product was packaged, distributed, stored, and used. The second was to determine the critical control points or CCPs in the food production process. In other words, every point in that process where something could go wrong to allow

pathogens to contaminate the food. And then the third was to establish a system to monitor all of those critical control points. So, as a hypothetical example, let's say flour used to make these byte sized foods was tested on arriving at the factory and was found to be free of bacterial contamination from there were there any ways that bacteria could be introduced during storage, like through rodents getting into the storage area, or a water leak, or exposure to other materials in the same storage space. How about on the production line, say if the same equipment was also being used to process ingredients that were not being held to these same strict standards. What steps needed to be taken to make sure that the people working on

the production line were all healthy, and that the materials used in the packaging were sterile, and that once the finished product was in there, the packaging was enough to protect it from any possible contaminants. This becomes a branching tree of just one problem after another, on and on and on. Yeah, that's not a comprehensive list of anything at all. That's something I made up as an example of a tiny, tiny slice of it. This was a huge undertaking, at least as far as the team knew, nobody had ever done this kind of thorough analysis of a food production process before. They had to evaluate every step of this entire production system and figure out all of the things that could go wrong at each step.

And some of these things that could go wrong were really tiny, Like at one point somebody realized that a telephone and the processing plant could become a source of cross contamination if it was not kept clean. Just thinking about all of the ways that we in our daily lives are introducing stuff all over everything we touch. This is why, when I come back to my home from anywhere, the first thing I do is wash my hands. This process also required meticulous record keeping where the raw ingredients had come from, every step those ingredients took as they were made into food and packaged, the temperature of the production line, and the food at various stages where that finished food was stored on and on. Ingredients were still

tested before they were used to make sure they weren't harboring any pathogens, and the finished products were tested at the end of the process. All of this sounds laborious, and it was, but the end result was that the process was way less wasteful. They were not having to destroy huge amounts of finished product anymore, and then everybody was also confident about sending those finished products into space.

Baumann was so impressed by the end result of all of this that he pushed for Pillsbury to implement something similar for its consumer products, not just for the space program. Meanwhile, out in the rest of the world, more international standards and guidelines were being developed to try to protect consumers from pathogens and contaminants in food. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Health Organization had convened a conference on food additives in nineteen fifty five.

In nineteen sixty the FAO and the WHO established the Codex Alimentarius Commission, named after the Codex Alimentarius Austriacis that we mentioned earlier, and that was to draft voluntary guidelines for things like food safety, food labeling, and other food related issues. The first version of this document, known as Codex Alimentarius, was completed in eighteen sixty three. But even as the international community and individual nations were drafting more guidelines, the food industry was also growing in both size and complexity.

All around the world, Companies were producing more foods and developing different types of foods, as well as more complex products like TV dinners, and a lot of places, production had gotten so fast and so complex that it was no longer possible for inspectors to physically inspect everything, So in some places inspectors started focusing on making sure manufacturers were following established food safety protocols or legal requirements. Plus, with all this increasing complexity, sometimes the requirements were lagging behind what people were actually doing. There were more and more opportunities for pathogens to be introduced into the food system.

Although Pillsbury had been successfully making food for the space program. In Arch of nineteen seventy one, it had to recall one of its own products, a creamy wheat cereal called farina. A glass shield had broken at the processing plant in Springfield, Illinois, contaminating some of the product, but thanks to Pillsbury's record keeping, the company knew what to recall, specifically twenty seven and a half ounce packages of the product marked with one particular code, which had been shipped to western Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Sounds like a really normal way for a food recall to happen now, but at the time like this was a level of record keeping that a lot of places just did not have. This recall was announced just days before Pillsbury publicly presented the system now known as Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points or a HASSP, for the first time. This was at the nineteen seventy one US National Conference on Food Protection. The idea was for food producer to use these steps to prevent their products from becoming contaminated with pathogens or foreign materials in the first place, rather than detecting and dealing with problems after foods were already on the market that didn't start to happen right away, though,

and we're going to talk about this more after a sponsor break. Killsbury's recall of farina in March of nineteen seventy one was the kind of thing that might have led to a big public outcry. On top of the product potentially being contaminated with glass, which is a scary idea, farina was something that a lot of people were feeding to babies and small children. In spite of this, though, there just wasn't a ton of industry interest in the Hassip system until a few months later in nineteen seventy one.

That was when Samuel and Grace Cochrane both contracted bachelor them from a can of Vicious Wise, nothing had seemed strange to them about the soup when they opened the can, but when they ate it, it had tasted a little bit off. Both of them had only eaten a few bites of it before throwing the rest of it away.

Samuel died and Grace had to be hospitalized for several months. This led to a massive recall in which the US government seized one point five million cans of food that the company had produced. All of this was happening at the same time, as the public had serious doubts about the FDA's ability to protect the food supply, especially when it turned out that the plant where that soup had been made hadn't been inspected by the FDA in more than four years. The company had also apparently known about the problems on its production line, but hadn't taken steps to address them. Fearing backlash against canned food across the board, the National Canners Association proposed making changes across the industry,

many of them based on HASSEP principles. In the wake of this and other recalls, as well as various expose's involving uninspected, unsanitary food processing facilities, the FDA asked Pillsbury to establish a HASSEP training program for FDA food inspectors. A workshop called Food Safety through the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points System was held for the first time in September of nineteen seventy two. In nineteen seventy three, in response to ongoing issues with botulism, including a massive recall of millions of cans of potentially tainted mushrooms, the FDA incorporated HASSEP principles into regulations for the production of low acid canned foods. This was a major change, and not every manufacturer wanted to do it. Some smaller businesses

really couldn't afford the upfront costs of implementing a HANSEIP system, even though the cost per can of the finished food was really pretty small. By nineteen seventy four, Pillsbury had implemented a HASSEB system at all of its factories and at Burger King restaurants, which it owned at the time.

By the nineteen eighties, other federal agencies in the US that were connected to food safety in some way were also adopting a HASSEP framework, and other countries were starting to use it as well. The World Health Organization published a report on HASSEP and recommended its use in nineteen eighty three. In nineteen eighty five, the National Academy of Sciences evaluated the pros and cons of HASSP and of random sampling and bacterial testing as ways to ensure food safety, and after that analysis also recommended HASSEP as a way to help insure safe food. Around this time, the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods issued a series of reports on HASSEP. Over this process, the number of

principles expanded from three to seven. Two of the new principles had been kind of implied in the earlier version but not specifically spelled out, and then the other two were new. The National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods endorsed the expanded version of HASSEP in nineteen ninety two, and this set of seven principles is still used today.

They are one conduct a hazard analysis. Two identify the critical control points or CCPs. Three established critical control limits for each CCP. It's like how far out of alignment can something be before you consider it to be failed. Four established monitoring procedures for each CCP. Five established corrective actions, or the steps to take if something goes wrong, six established record keeping procedures, and seven establish verification procedures. Although various parts of the food industry around the world were moving toward implementing this kind of framework, the process was slow, and in a lot of places the changes were voluntary, and the cost and work involved were not the only obstacles.

In some places, inspectors were used to using their senses looking at, touching, or smelling things on a continuous basis. The idea of moving to a system that involved making sure a processing plant was following a particular process and keeping up with that paperwork seemed counterintuitive. Some inspectors joke that hassup stood for have a cup of coffee and prey.

But then in nineteen ninety three, another incident prompted big changes in food safety in the United States. This was an outbreak of E Coli O one five seven h seven connected to Jack in the box restaurants. E Coli O one five seven eight seven had been identified in nineteen seventy two, and by nineteen eighty two it was known as a potential food borne pathogen, but this outbreak in nineteen ninety three is really what brought it to public attention. There were more than seven hundred confirmed cases in four states, and four children died. The source of the outbreak was hamburger patties that had been contaminated with the bacteria and then had not been cooked thoroughly enough before being served to customers. Other major outbreaks elsewhere had

also sparked similar attention in other places around the world, including the outbreak of bovine spongeiform encephalopathy that struck the UK in the nineteen eighties and nineties. After this outbreak, Jack in the Box became the first fast food company to implement HASSP. An International HASSEP Alliance was established to provide uniform training programs and standards, as well as education, training, and research around the world in nineteen ninety four. In nineteen ninety six, the USDA issued its Pathogen Reduction pr HASSEP Final Rule, requiring all meat and poultry slaughter and processing establishments to design and implement a HASSP system. However, there were also criticisms of the USDA's nineteen ninety six rule.

Although this was a major change to the way food safety was being approached and meat and poultry slaughtering plants, it didn't totally align with all of the HASSET principles. For example, in a HASSP system, if something goes wrong, corrective action should be taken immediately to fix it, But in the USDA rule, a company that failed to meet standards for salmonella contamination would be retested a few months later, and then if the company failed that test as well, they got another opportunity to test. The USDA was empowered to close down a facility that failed three salmonella tests in a row, but that didn't happen very often and a lot of time passed between those three tests. Years later, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals also ruled that the

USDA didn't actually have the authority to shut down a plant for failing to pay these tests, and that weakened the USDA's enforcement powers. Even so, it's estimated that in the twenty years after the us adopted HASSEP rules for various parts of the food industry, food born illness has declined about twenty percent, and HASSUP has become a global standard for food safety. Since the global food system has hundreds of different nations involved, all with their own rules and regulatory bodies, the Global Food Safety Initiative was established in the year two thousand to coordinate among them. The Global Food Safety Initiative is benchmark standards which require HASSEP implementation.

There are all kinds of different international standards that incorporate HASSEP in some way, and HASSEP based systems are the most common framework for preventing food born illness around the world. At this point, all of the member countries of the World Trade Organization recognized the Codex Elementarius commissions recommended guidelines for food safety in das. Those guidelines are based in part on HASSEP. At this point, in general, hasset based guidelines are the most widespread among the world's wealthiest countries.

The laws connected to this have continued to evolve around the world. In the US, for example, the Food Safety Modernization Act was passed in twenty eleven. Its focus is on preventing food borne illnesses rather than on responding to outbreaks after they happen, and its rules related to everything from agricultural water to food traceability, to transportation of food to standards for growing produce. Most of what we talked about today has involved meat, poultry, and processed foods like canned goods, but today contaminated fruits and vegetables are a major source of food borne illness outbreaks. Before we wrap up, we should note that none of this is perfect. That Codex Elementarius is a set of international guidelines, but they're recommendations.

They're not legal requirements. Here in the US, the whole food safety system is a patchwork made up from more than a century of various federal regulations as well as state and local regulations. There are at least seven different federal agencies responsible for the safety and quality of some part of the food system. I've seen people list numbers as high as twelve. Like there are a bunch of federal agencies involved in all of this, and some of this is very weird and confusing, like the Food and Drug Administration is responsible for food like the name says, but not for meat unless it's exotic meat. They're also responsible for eggs, but only in the shell. Meat, poultry, and the processing and grading of eggs all fall to

the US Department of Agriculture, not the FDA, and then fish and seafood grading falls under neither of those That is under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Although the Food Safety and Inspection Service is responsible for inspecting meat and poultry, twenty seven states run their own inspection programs, which are required to be equivalent to or better than the federal standard. And then there are various gaps and gray areas in this whole process, like the vegan crumble recall we mentioned at the top of the show was for a product from a meal delivery company, and meal delivery companies are kind of in this gray area between restaurants which are locally regulated, and food producers which are

federally regulated by the FDA. There's way more about this, and that recall specifically in the episode of maintenance phase that we mentioned at the top of the show. There have also been times when existing regulations have been rolled back, including in twenty twenty during the earlier months of the COVID nineteen pandemic, when limits were waived on how quickly processing lines could operate, something that critics said was dangerous for both worker safety and the safety of the food supply. Yeah, basically, so many workers that so many food production plants got COVID and worse sick or died that there were like requirements that were meant to allow inspectors to work quickly enough were raised to let the factories catch up. So

even with all of this, there are still a lot of food born illness outbreaks and a lot of people who contract a food born illness from something they ate at home that may or may not ever be connected to some kind of a bigger pattern. The World Health Organization estimates that as many as six hundred million people, or almost ten percent of the world's population, gets sick from something they ate every year it leads to more than four hundred twenty thousand deaths, and about one hundred and twenty five thousand of those are in children under the age of five and then beyond illnesses. Food safety also connects to broader issues like food security and hunger.

And I just really like the fact that one of the big methods to try to get that in a better place came from the Space program. So many things that we benefit from in daily lives come from the Space program and needs to figure out how can we make something really really safe on a very expensive mission hurdling through space. Yeah, thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

SYMHC Classics: Astronaut Origins of Food Safety

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