SYMHC Classics: Astronaut Origins of Food Safety

This 2022 episode examines the development of a systematic approach to food safety, which 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. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 0:54Holly Frey?

  We've all tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose, and it leaves us more anxious than informed. Our feeds are full of wellness trends, but how do we know what's real, what's exaggerated, and what's just wrong? Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends, not to cancel them, but to understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. So listen to Health vs. Hype wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Old Gays are back with Silver Linings, their lovable podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with Vive Healthcare. Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune into Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Whether you're calling the wise women in your life, video calling your girlfriends across the country, or checking in on someone who always knows how to make you smile, staying connected matters. Those small conversations, shared laughs, and quick hellos are what keep relationships strong even when life gets busy.

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• 2:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  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.

• 2:51Holly Frey?

  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 describe that as sounding fairly normal. That might seem ironic in the wake of multiple recent foodborne 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 2011 required rules for meaningful food traceability, including for produce, but those rules were not written until 2022. The FDA was supposed to start enforcing these rules on January 20, 2026, but industry

• 3:34Holly Frey?

  pushback and budgetary issues have pushed that date until July 2028, 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.

• 3:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  This episode originally came out on December 5, 2022. Enjoy.

• 4:02Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 4:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 4:15Holly Frey?

  And I'm Holly Frey.

• 4:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 salmonella. There were 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 in case folks don't know.

• 4:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  There was also a recent episode of the podcast Sawbones 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, like prior host's episode on Harvey Washington Wiley and his poison squad, or our episode on the Swill Milk scandal of 1858, or our episode on the history of canning.

• 5:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 as 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 foodborne illnesses and spread of disease through food is like a trouble point for you, then this one might be a little challenging.

• 6:23Holly Frey?

  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 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, 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.

• 7:04Holly Frey?

  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.

• 7:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  A lot of what we're talking about today, though, mostly has roots in the 19th 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 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.

• 7:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  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.

• 8:12Holly Frey?

  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."

• 8:42Holly Frey?

  As another example, in 1890, 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 1891. 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.

• 9:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  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.

• 9:42Holly Frey?

  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 1891. 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 1911. This was one of the Western world's first comprehensive food codes.

• 10:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  Although legislators in the United States started trying to introduce food and drug laws in the 1880s, 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 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

• 11:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  novel, The Jungle, which was published serially in 1905 and then as a book in 1906.

• 11:17Holly Frey?

  And although this was a novel, Sinclair based it on undercover research that he had done in Chicago's meatpacking 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 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

• 11:58Holly Frey?

  Inspection Act in 1906, and these became the first broad consumer protection laws in the United States.

• 12:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  Initially, the USDA's Bureau of Chemistry was responsible for enforcing the Pure Food and Drug Act's 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 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.

• 12:40Holly Frey?

  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 1926, following concerns about the safety of poultry. But at first, these inspections were voluntary.

• 13:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  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, which is caused by Salmonella typhi. In 1909, 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.

• 13:50Holly Frey?

  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 1930. The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 contained multiple new provisions, including ones related to canned food and factory inspections. In 1940, the FDA was moved from the Department of Agriculture to the Federal Security Agency. And in 1949, 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 1950.

• 14:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 II. 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 foodborne illnesses, and we will get to that after a sponsor break.

• 15:15Speaker 03

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  Yeah, folks, a YouTube Premium experience gives you access to exclusive YouTube features and benefits, and these are real game changers for us.

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  I love this on plane flights.

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  Ben, how have you been using YouTube Premium?

• 16:19Speaker 03

  Oh, man. Well, Matt, you know, I like to take a night walk, and YouTube Premium is perfect for this because of the background play. So I can pull up a documentary about the neighborhood I'm walking around in, put the phone in my pocket, and still hear everything perfectly.

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  First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?

• 16:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hey, everybody, it's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. He's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, defining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.

• 17:03Speaker 05

  It was going to rival anything that was already built, and that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.

• 17:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  That includes Field Services Manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.

• 17:17Speaker 06

  Through what Alan's whole crew designed, we connected the event visitors to the world.

• 17:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.

• 17:27Speaker 06

  To actually see the whole stadium light up and data's flowing is a beautiful thing.

• 17:31Speaker 05

  What the fans experience is incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.

• 17:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  AT&T, connecting fans to what they love. Connecting changes everything. AT&T. So you're considering getting a home security system, but you want something that fits your space. Well, with ADT Blue, it's easy to customize a system that's right for you and set it up yourself. Just pick the kit and monitoring plan that makes sense for your home. Let's say you're worried about package theft. The ADT Plus app can walk you through setting up a new doorbell camera kit. Once it's installed, ADT Pros can help you keep tabs on it 24/7, or you can manage it yourself from the ADT Plus app. There are no long-term contracts, so you can change your monitoring plan whenever you want. The flexibility doesn't end there. You can add to your system as you need to with things like extra cameras or motion

• 18:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  sensors. Some life decisions are hard, but thanks to ADT Blue, you can DIY trusted ADT home security in a snap. Head to ADT.com/BLU to build your system today. And to hear more about home protection and other grown-up topics, check out new episodes of Grown Up Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 18:47Holly Frey?

  We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes, doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.

• 19:29Holly Frey?

  Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 19:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 11, a foodborne illness in the middle of a space mission had the potential to be catastrophic, putting the lives of the sick astronaut and everyone else onboard 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.

• 20:39Holly Frey?

  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.

• 21:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  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.

• 21:37Holly Frey?

  Also, if only safe ingredients were going into processing, but contaminated food was coming out, that suggested there was a problem. Dr. Howard Baumann, who 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 could succeed would be to establish control over the entire process, the raw materials, the processing environment, and the people involved."

• 22:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  Establishing control over the entire process was an enormous team effort. Initially, before Baumann 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 Dr. Paul Lachance, who was NASA's Food and Nutrition Coordinator. On the Natick lab side were food technologist Dr. Herbert A. Hollander, microbiologist Dr. Ahmed El-Bisi, and dietitian Mary V. Clicka. NASA and the Army also worked with several corporations to actually produce the food,

• 23:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  and the primary one that became involved in this food safety effort was Pillsbury. Pillsbury became part of the team in 1959.

• 23:12Holly Frey?

  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 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.

• 23:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  They ultimately developed a process based on three principles. The 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, 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.

• 24:37Holly Frey?

  So as a hypothetical example, let's say flour used to make these bite-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

• 25:19Holly Frey?

  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.

• 25:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 in the processing plant could become a source of cross-contamination if it was not kept clean.

• 26:09Holly Frey?

  Just thinking about all of the ways that we in our daily lives are introducing stuff all over everything we touch.

• 26:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  This is why when I come back to my home from anywhere, the first thing I do is wash my hands.

• 26:23Holly Frey?

  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.

• 26:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  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.

• 27:19Holly Frey?

  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 1955. In 1960, the FAO and the WHO established the Codex Alimentarius Commission, named after the Codex Alimentarius Austriacus that we mentioned earlier. And that was to draft voluntary guidelines for things like food safety, food labeling, and other food-related issues.

• 27:57Holly Frey?

  The first version of this document, known as Codex Alimentarius, was completed in 1963.

• 28:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  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. In 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

• 28:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  what people were actually doing. There were more and more opportunities for pathogens to be introduced into the food system.

• 28:58Holly Frey?

  Although Pillsbury had been successfully making food for the space program, in March of 1971, 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, 27 1/2 ounce packages of the product marked with one particular code, which had been shipped to Western Massachusetts and Connecticut.

• 29:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 HASSIP, for the first time. This was at the 1971 US 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, rather than detecting and dealing with problems after foods were already on the market.

• 30:16Holly Frey?

  That didn't start to happen right away, though. And we're going to talk about this more after a sponsor break.

• 30:25Speaker 03

  So YouTube Premium, it takes something you already love, that being YouTube, and it makes it even better. Not just the experience, but the content, the creators.

• 30:35Speaker 04

  The feeling of finding exactly what you're into. For every mood, every moment of your day, Premium transforms that experience into a more supercharged, enhanced way to enjoy YouTube.

• 30:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, folks, a YouTube Premium experience gives you access to exclusive YouTube features and benefits. And these are real game changers for us.

• 30:55Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, that includes, but it's not limited to, ad-free viewing of YouTube. Imagine no more ads popping up in the middle of videos or at the end of videos, uninterrupted videos.

• 31:05Speaker 03

  And now think about this, let's say you're using YouTube on the go, you're exercising, you're washing dishes. You can have YouTube playing in the background with Premium, which means you can keep listening while your screen is locked.

• 31:18Speaker 04

  Also, you can download videos offline, so you don't even need Wi-Fi connection to watch your stuff.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  I love this on plane flights.

• 31:26Speaker 04

  Ben, how have you been using YouTube Premium?

• 31:29Speaker 03

  Oh, man. Well, Matt, you know, I like to take a night walk and YouTube Premium is perfect for this because of the background play, so I can pull up a documentary about the neighborhood I'm walking around in, put the phone in my pocket and still hear everything perfectly.

• 31:45Speaker 04

  Amazing.

• 31:46Speaker 03

  So don't delay, sign up now for your free trial. Terms and conditions apply.

• 31:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers and real people trying these trends.

• 32:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 32:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter and decades of perspective from

• 33:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  four friends proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 33:53Speaker 07

  Okay, chicken nugget fans, I've got huge news. The new Burger King Chicken Nuggets just dropped, and they are the crispiest, the juiciest and the tastiest chicken nuggets ever at Burger King. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old chicken nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. To go along with the new chicken nuggets, a lot of the sauces were reinvented too, because better chicken nuggets deserve better sauces. We're talking new buffalo sauce, honey mustard, sweet and sour, and even a whole new option too, the new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating US restaurants. I mean, you need to taste it all for yourself. This new chicken nugget, reinvented, based on real

• 34:38Speaker 07

  feedback, is made with 100% white meat chicken and is now better than ever. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets and sauces today.

• 34:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  Pillsbury's recall of Farina in March of 1971 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 HACCP system until a few months later in 1971. That was when Samuel and Grace Cochrane both contracted botulism from a can of Vichy Swaz. 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

• 35:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 1.5 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,

• 36:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  the National Caners Association proposed making changes across the industry, many of them based on HACCP 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 HACCP training program for FDA food inspectors. A workshop called Food Safety Through the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point System was held for the first time in September of 1972. In 1973, in response to ongoing issues with botulism, including a massive recall of millions of cans of

• 37:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  potentially tainted mushrooms, the FDA incorporated HACCP 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 HACCP system, even though the cost per can of the finished food was really pretty small. By 1974, Pillsbury had implemented a HACCP system at all of its factories and at Burger King restaurants, which it owned at the time. By the 1980s, other federal agencies in the US that were connected to food safety in some way were also adopting a HACCP framework and other countries were

• 37:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  starting to use it as well. The World Health Organization published a report on HACCP and recommended its use in 1983. In 1985, the National Academy of Sciences evaluated the pros and cons of HACCP and of random sampling and bacterial testing as ways to ensure food safety. And after that analysis, also recommended HACCP as a way to help ensure safe food. Around this time, the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods issued a series of reports on HACCP. 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.

• 38:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  And then the other two were new. The National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods endorsed the expanded version of HACCP in 1992. 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, establish critical control limits for each CCP. That's like, how far out of alignment can something be before you consider it to be failed? Four, establish monitoring procedures for each CCP. Five, establish corrective actions or the steps to take if something goes wrong. Six, establish record-keeping procedures. And seven, establish verification procedures.

• 39:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 joked that HACCP stood for have a cup of coffee and pray. But then in 1993, another incident prompted big changes in food safety in the United States.

• 40:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  This was an outbreak of E. coli 0157H7 connected to Jack in the Box restaurants. E. coli 0157H7 had been identified in 1972, and by 1982, it was known as a potential foodborne pathogen. But this outbreak in 1993 is really what brought it to public attention. There were more than 700 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,

• 40:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  including the outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy that struck the UK in the 1980s and 90s.

• 40:59Holly Frey?

  After this outbreak, Jack in the Box became the first fast food company to implement HACCP. An international HACCP alliance was established to provide uniform training programs and standards, as well as education, training, and research around the world in 1994. In 1996, the USDA issued its Pathogen Reduction, PR HACCP Final Rule, requiring all meat and poultry slaughter and processing establishments to design and implement a HACCP system.

• 41:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  However, there were also criticisms of the USDA's 1996 rule. Although this was a major change to the way food safety was being approached in meat and poultry slaughtering plants, it didn't totally align with all of the HACCP principles. For example, in a HACCP 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,

• 42:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 pass these tests, and that weakened the USDA's enforcement powers.

• 42:30Holly Frey?

  Even so, it's estimated that in the 20 years after the US adopted HACCP rules for various parts of the food industry, foodborne illnesses declined about 20%. And HACCP 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 2000 to coordinate among them.

• 42:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Global Food Safety Initiative is benchmark standards which require HACCP implementation. There are all kinds of different international standards that incorporate HACCP in some way, and HACCP-based systems are the most common framework for preventing foodborne illness around the world. At this point, all of the member countries of the World Trade Organization recognize the Codex Elementarius Commission's recommended guidelines for food safety, and those guidelines are based in part on HACCP. At this point, in general, HACCP-based guidelines are the most widespread among the world's wealthiest countries.

• 43:36Holly Frey?

  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 2011. Its focus is on preventing foodborne 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 foodborne illness outbreaks.

• 44:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 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 people list numbers as high as 12. 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,

• 44:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  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, 27 states run their own inspection programs, which are required to be equivalent to or better than the federal standard.

• 45:31Holly Frey?

  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 2020, during the earlier months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when limits were waived on how quickly processing lines could operate, something that critics said

• 46:15Holly Frey?

  was dangerous for both worker safety and the safety of the food supply.

• 46:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, basically, so many workers at so many food production plants got COVID and were 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 foodborne illness outbreaks, and a lot of people who contract a foodborne 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 600 million people, or almost 10% of the world's population, get sick from something they ate every year. That leads to more than 420,000 deaths,

• 47:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  and about 125,000 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.

• 47:25Holly Frey?

  Yes. 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?

• 47:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 47:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected]. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 48:08Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 48:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  You ever show up late to the game and your friends already saved your seat, your drink, even a plate? That's looking out. That's having your back. And that's exactly what AT&T does with the AT&T Guarantee. They know staying connected matters, so they actually guarantee a network that comes through when it counts. AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they'll proactively make it right, just like that friend who takes care of things before you even ask. AT&T: Connecting changes everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.

• 49:12Speaker 06

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• 49:28Speaker 03

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• 50:12Speaker 03

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• 50:35Speaker 06

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• 50:43Speaker 00

  Hola a todos. Soy Jamie Lynn Sigler. Cuando me diagnosticaron, tenía veintitantos años, y todo mi mundo cambió por completo. Pero con el tiempo decidí que no iba a permitir que eso frenara mi vida. Quise tomar las riendas. Y después de hablar con mi médico sobre mis opciones, la elección para mí fue obvia. Boom, eso es Kisimta. Obtenga más información sobre Kisimta o fotumab en kisimta.com. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.