The Astronaut Origins of Food Safety

The development of a systematic approach to food safety didn’t happen until the 20th century. And it's tied directly to NASA trying to make sure astronauts didn’t get food poisoning in space.

Research:

• Cronk, Theodore C. “The Historic Evolution of HACCP: Better Questions, Safer Foods.” Food and Drug Law Journal , 1994, Vol. 49, No. 3 (1994). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26659230
• DiCicco, Mike. “How the Moon Landing Led to Safer Food for Everyone.” NASA Spinoff. 11/23/2020. https://spinoff.nasa.gov/moon-landing-food-safety
• Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and World Health Organization. “Understanding Codex.” Rome. 2018. https://www.fao.org/3/CA1176EN/ca1176en.pdf
• Fortin, Neal D. “The Hang-Up With HACCP: The Resistance to Translating Science Into Food Safety Law.” Food and Drug Law Journal , 2003, Vol. 58, No. 4 (2003). https://www.jstor.org/stable/26660309
• Hulebak,, Karen L. and Wayne Schlosser. “HACCP History and Conceptual Overview.” U.S. Department of Agriculture
• Institute of Medicine (US) and National Research Council (US) Committee on the Review of the Use of Scientific Criteria and Performance Standards for Safe Food. Scientific Criteria to Ensure Safe Food. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2003. 1, Historical Perspective on the Use of Food Safety Criteria and Performance Standards. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK221553/
• Johnson, Renee. “The Federal Food Safety System: A Primer.” Congressional Research Service. December 16, 2016. https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/RS22600.pdf
• Myhrvold, Nathan et al. “The Complex Origins of Food Safety Rules--Yes, You Are Overcooking Your Food.” Scientific American. 3/13/2011. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/complex-origins-food-safety-rules/
• “A Dividend in Food Safety.” January 1, 1991. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20020086314
• Ross-Nazzal, Jennifer. “’From Farm to Fork’: How Space Food Standards Impacted the Food Industry and Changed Food Safety Standards.” From Societal Impact of Spaceflight. Government Printing Office, 2007. https://history.nasa.gov/sp4801-chapter12.pdf
• Safe Food Alliance. “The History of HACCP.” https://safefoodalliance.com/haccp/the-history-of-haccp/
• Weinroth MD, Belk AD, Belk KE. History, development, and current status of food safety systems worldwide. Animal Frontiers. 2018 Aug 30;8(4):9-15. doi: 10.1093/af/vfy016. PMID: 32002225; PMCID: PMC6951898.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Lately, a
series of things has made me go, I should really

(00:21):
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

(00:43):
with salmonella. There were all just a whole lot of
people in the comments who did not know that if
you have salmonella, you can 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

(01:07):
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, like prior

(01:29):
hosts episode on Harvey Washington Wiley and his Poison Squad,
or our episode on the Swill Milk scandal of eighteen
fifty eight, or 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

(01:49):
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 some people get
food poisoning or anything. But I know that a lot
of stuff about food can be complicated for people. So

(02:11):
if hearing about a lot of food born illnesses and
spread of disease through food is like a troubled 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 program. There have been religious
and cultural practices that had some influence on food safety

(02:33):
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 handwashing, and cultural taboos
related to which plants and animals are considered okay to eat.
Surviving texts from Egypt to India, China, Greece, and Rome,

(02:55):
and oral traditions from other parts of the world all
include methods for preserve, ving, 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,

(03:15):
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 urbanization and industrialization,
especially in North America and parts of Europe. The growth
of cities meant that more people were buying and eating

(03:36):
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

(03:58):
regulated in any way, and a push to cut costs
and bring in bigger profits led to a sharp rise
and things like food adulteration and other problems and 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

(04:22):
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 eight nine, Congress made the U

(04:44):
s Department of Agriculture responsible for ensuring that beef exports
to Europe were safe, and an inspection system was set
up in eighteen nine 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

(05:07):
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.

(05:28):
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

(05:49):
passing laws incorporating these and other recommendations. For example, and
international Conference of Food chemists and other scientists was held
in Vienna in eighteen nine 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

(06:10):
the Codex Alimentaryus Austriachis. 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

(06:30):
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 Dr Harvey W. Wiley's efforts to determine
whether food additives were safe by feeding them to human

(06:53):
test subjects, who became known as his poison squad. Although
Wiley and others recommended legis slation 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 o five and then

(07:14):
as a book in nineteen o six. And although this
was a novel, Sinclair based it on undercover research that
he had done in Chicago's meat packing plants. Sinclair was
really focused on the truly appalling working conditions in these plants,
but when the public read his novel, people were far
more outraged by descriptions of them. It's just revolting, lee unsanitary,

(07:37):
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 o six, and these became the

(08:01):
first broad consumer protection laws in the United States. Initially,
the U. S d A'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 Drag Administration. The U. S d A's Bureau

(08:22):
of Animal Industry was responsible for inspecting the animals that
were raised and slaughtered 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.

(08:45):
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 U s
d A started inspecting poultry farms in nineteen six following
concerns about the safety of poultry, but at first these
inspections were voluntary. Although most of this initial legislative focus

(09:08):
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, just caused by Salmonella typhi.

(09:30):
In n nine, the American public health associations 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

(09:52):
food safety in response to public concerns, including authorizing the
FDA to set standards for quality and phil for and
foods with the exception of canned milk and meat. In
nineteen thirty. The Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of
ninety eight contained multiple new provisions, including once related to
canned food and factory inspections. In nineteen forty the f

(10:16):
d A was moved from the Department of Agriculture to
the Federal Security Agency. 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

(10:36):
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

(10:57):
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 board illnesses, and we
will get to that after a sponsor break. One of

(11:21):
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 their their food would
not make them sick like we talked about with motion
sickness in our episode on the galut At eleven. A
food board illness in the middle of a space mission
had the potential to be catastrophic, putting the lives of

(11:44):
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

(12:06):
first foods eaten in space included squeezeable 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,

(12:30):
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

(12:50):
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. Dr Howard Bauman, who

(13:12):
worked at Pillsbury and as a consultant, said 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 and raw materials. He went on to say, quote,
we concluded, after extensive evaluation, that the only way we

(13:34):
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 Bauman got involved, there were two principal players. They

(13:54):
were NASA and the US Army Native Research Development and
Engineering SCENT are previously known as the Quartermaster Food and
Container Institute. One of the key people involved from NASA
was Dr PAULA. Chance, who was NASA's Food and Nutrition coordinator.
On the Native lab side, where food technologist Dr Herbert A. Hollander,

(14:17):
microbiologist Dr Hahmed Lbs, and dietitian Mary V. Clicka. 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 nine nine. At the time, the

(14:38):
military was using a framework called failure mode and Effects
analysis as a process analysis tool. This essentially involved examining
all of the ways of 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,

(15:02):
and to make sure systems and processes went as planned.
The team decided to build on this concept to develop
a system to ensure safe 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

(15:23):
first was to conduct an analysis of all the possible
hazards 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

(15:45):
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 the as
critical control points. So, as a hypothetical example, let's say
flower used to make these bite sized foods was tested

(16:08):
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

(16:29):
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 we're 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

(16:51):
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 it's 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

(17:13):
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.

(17:34):
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 wrong

(17:54):
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

(18:14):
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.
Bauman was so impressed by the end result of all

(18:36):
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

(18:59):
had convened a conference on food additives in nineteen fifty five.
In nineteen sixty, the f a O and the w
h O established the Codex Alimentarius Commission, named after the
Codex Alimentarius austriachis that we mentioned earlier, and that was
to draft voluntary guidelines for things like food safety, food labeling,

(19:19):
and other food related issues. The first version of this document,
known as Codex Alimentarius, was completed in nineteen 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

(19:42):
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

(20:07):
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 March of ninety

(20:28):
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,

(20:52):
which had been shipped to western Massachusetts and Connecticut. It
sounds like a really normal way for a food reclurry
call 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

(21:15):
Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points or hass IT, for
the first time. This was at the one U S
National Conference on Food Protection. The idea was for food
producers to use these steps to prevent their products from
becoming contaminated with pathogens or foreign materials in the first place,

(21:35):
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. Pillsbury's recall of farina in March of one

(21:59):
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 two
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 nine That was

(22:23):
when Samuel and Grace Cochrane both contracted botulism from a
can of Vicious Swas. 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

(22:44):
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

(23:06):
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,

(23:29):
many of them based on hasset principles. In the wake
of this and other recalls, as well as various exposes
involving uninspected, unsanitary food processing facilities, the FDA asked Pillsbury
to establish a hasset training program for FDA food inspectors.

(23:49):
A workshop called Food Safety through the Hazard Analysis and
Critical Control Points System was held for the first time
in September of nine two and nine seventy three. In
response to ongoing issues with botuli is um, including a
massive recall of millions of cans of potentially tainted mushrooms,

(24:10):
the FDA incorporated hasset 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
HASSP system, even though the cost per can of the

(24:30):
finished food was really pretty small. By nineteen seventy four,
Pillsbury had implemented a HASSP 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 we're also adopting a HASSET framework, and other countries

(24:52):
were starting to use it as well. The World Health
Organization published a report on HASSOP and recommended its use.
In nineteen eight three in the National Academy of Sciences
evaluated the pros and cons of HASSOP and of random
sampling in bacterial testing as ways to ensure food safety,
and after that analysis also recommended HASSEP as a way

(25:15):
to help ensure safe food. Around this time, the National
Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods issued a series
of reports on HASSOP. 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

(25:36):
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 HASSOP, and the set
of seven principles is still used today. They are one
conduct a hazard analysis to identify the critical control points

(25:56):
or c cps. Three established critical control mits 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 are the
steps to take if something goes wrong. Six established record

(26:17):
keeping procedures, and seven established verification procedures. Although various parts
of the food industry around the world we're 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,

(26:40):
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 has up stood for have a cup of coffee
and prey. But then nine another incident prompted big changes

(27:04):
in food safety in the United States. This was an
outbreak of E. Coal I O one five seven h
seven connected to Jack in the Box restaurants. E Coli
O one five seven h 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

(27:24):
in nine 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

(27:44):
to customers. Other major outbreaks elsewhere had also sparked similar
attention in other places around the world, including the outbreak
of bovine spongeform en cephalopathy that struck the U K
in the nineteen eighties and nineties. After this outbreak, Jack
in the Box became the first fast food company to

(28:04):
implement HASSUP. An international HASSEP alliance was established to provide
uniform training programs and standards, as well as education, training
and research around the world. In in the U s
d A issued its pathogen Reduction pr HASSEP final rule
requiring all meat and poultry slaughter and processing establishments to

(28:27):
design and implement a HASSP system. However, there were also
criticisms of the U s d AS 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 Hassett principles. For example,
in a HASSP system, if something goes wrong, corrective action

(28:50):
should be taken immediately to fix it, But in the
U s d A 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 U
s d A was empowered to close down a facility

(29:11):
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 U s d A
didn't actually have the authority to shut down a plant
for failing to pass these tests, and that weekend the
U s DA's enforcement powers. Even so, It's estimated that

(29:34):
in the twenty years after the US adopted HASSA rules
for various parts of the food industry, food boarn illnesses
declined about and HASSA 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

(29:56):
two thousand to coordinate among them. The Global Food Safety
Initiative as benchmarked standards which require HASSUP implementation. There are
all kinds of different international standards that incorporate hass UP
in some way, and hasse IT based systems are the
most common framework for preventing food board illness around the world.

(30:17):
At this point, all of the member countries of the
World Trade Organization recognized the Codex Elementary as Commissions recommended
guidelines for food safety, and those guidelines are based in
part on HASSP. At this point, in general, hass IT
based guidelines are the most widespread among the world's wealthiest countries.

(30:37):
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 eleven Its focus is on
preventing food born 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

(30:59):
stay neders 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 born illness outbreaks. Before we wrap up,
we should note that none of this is perfect. That
Codex Elementary US is a set of international guidelines, but

(31:20):
their recommendations they're not legal requirements here in the US.
The whole food safety system is really 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

(31:43):
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,

(32:04):
and the processing and grading of eggs all fall to
the U. S 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,

(32:27):
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

(32:47):
restaurants which are locally regulated and food producers, which are
federally regulated by the f d A. 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 during the earlier months of the

(33:09):
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 we're sick or died. That there were like

(33:30):
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 board illness outbreaks and a lot of people
who contract a food board illness from something they ate
at home that may or they may not ever be
connected to some kind of a bigger pattern. The World

(33:52):
Health Organization estimates that as many as six hundred million people,
or almost ten percent of the world's population it's sick
from something they ate every year that leads to more
than four deaths, and about a 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

(34:14):
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. Yes, so many things that we benefit
from and daily lives come from the Space Program and
needs to figure out how can we make something really

(34:37):
really safe on a very expensive mission herd link through Space.
Do you have listener mail? I do. I have listener
mail from Karen who wrote, Hello Holly and Tracy. My
husband and I watched the second and Nola Holmes movie
last night that's now available on Netflix. I got so
excited towards the middle of the film when I realized

(35:00):
a narrative is built around the real events of the
eight Match Girls Strike, something I knew about because of
Stuffy Miss and History Class. Yes, the filmmakers take some liberties,
but they do include Sarah Chapman as a leading character,
and we see a character who's suffering from Fossey jaw.
It's a fun take on the world of homes mixed
with a significant event in Victorian London, and I was

(35:22):
able to appreciate it all the more because of your podcast.
I am working my way through Stuffy Miss and History
Class from the original two thousand eight shows while also
listening to your weekly new shows. I've got a long commute.
I'm fascinated by how much the show has shifted, adapted,
and really matured into a well researched and written show
as new hosts were brought on. I've shared photos of

(35:43):
my fur babies before, but I can't not send a
new photo. We have five cats total, and the attached
photo is our of our beautiful sixteen year old Torty
Cassie short for Mary Cassatte. We're biased, but we think
she's the perfect kitty. Thank you for all you do, Karn,
So thank you so much. Number one. We're sending this

(36:04):
cat picture and I so love naming a cat after
Mary saw it. Someone who has been on my topic
list for a very long time that at some point
we will have a podcast on just came up in
passing a couple of times on other episodes. Um. I
also just recently watched in Nola Holmes too. Uh had
kind of a similar Hey, that's a thing that happened

(36:25):
for real. Um, So, thank you so much for sending
this note. Oh. I was also going to say, uh,
then I was like, should we have that episode as
a Saturday Classic, but it just was a Saturday Classic
last year, so uh, you can go find it in
the archive if you haven't heard and her curious if
you would like to send us a note about this
or any other podcast or history podcast that I heart

(36:47):
radio dot com. And we're also all over social media,
which is where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and
Instagram as Missed in History and you can subscribe to
our show on the I heart radio app or wherever
else you get your podcast asks. Stuff you missed in
History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For

(37:09):
more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. H