A Down-to-Earth Look at a Space-Age Food Safety Program

If you're old enough to remember black and white television, you might recall images of the first astronauts blasting off beyond the gravitational pull of Earth and filling your young head with questions about space travel. How did it feel to be weightless in space? How does one eat and sleep while encased in a tiny capsule circling miles above the planet?

The fledgling space program inspired a nation to look to the heavens. Children dreamed of becoming astronauts. They drank "Tang" -- an orange powdery concoction mixed with water and touted to be the breakfast drink of the space program.

But that was not the only aspect of the foodservice industry that got to share in the excitement of the era. The folks at the Pillsbury Company worked with the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) to develop a protocol to ensure that the food eaten by the astronauts was safe. Food poisoning is a miserable experience on terra firma. When it occurs to a space crew on a space mission it could be disastrous.

And, thus, food safety protocol joined the list of advancements that were born from the space program, including a system that we can apply in our kitchens to prevent serving contaminated food to our patrons -- the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) protocol.

In the 1960s, Howard Baumar, then Pillsbury's vice president of science and regulatory affairs, was instrumental in developing the HACCP for the space food program, in concert with NASA, the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force Space Lab. He later applied this procedure within Pillsbury.

HACCP and Your Restaurant

HACCP figures prominently in meat and poultry plants under federal inspection, as a means to reduce the contamination of meat and poultry products with disease-causing (pathogenic) bacteria. After a few well-publicized restaurant food poisoning incidents, HACCP is on the radar of everyone with a stake in food safety. In the restaurant, HACCP can provide owners and managers an effective mind-set to avoid food poisoning and ensure a safe food product is being used.

While you might think that running a restaurant is not nearly as important as sending people into space, consider that according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), food poisoning affects 76 million people each year in the United States, killing 5,000 and putting another 325,000 in the hospital. You have a great responsibility to your patrons.