Where did the concept of HACCP come from?
HACCP standards for the Hazards Analysis Critical Control Point evaluations. That’s a piece of engineering-speak. It was developed by rocket scientists at NASA, when the engineers who were preparing for the long space voyages to the moon felt that it would be a total disaster if there was an outbreak of food-borne illness on board the Apollo. They began looking at the whole food-safety issue from an engineering point of view. They said, “What can we do to prevent something from going wrong with the food that the astronauts eat?” … NASA went over all the foods that were going to be served, and they looked for the possibilities of a germ or a pathogen getting into the food. Then they said, “What are the critical control points to keep that from happening?” Is HACCP working on the ground? A modest decrease in salmonella infections and campylobacter is happening at about the time that HACCP is coming into place in the slaughter plants. I can’t know for certain that this decrease is relat
