A food-safety Web site is drawing some national attention after debuting at the Farm Progress Show in Alleman.

Dan Henroid, food safety director and extension specialist, said the site is designed to provide timely answers to food-safety questions.

“Food safety should not be taken for granted,” said Steve Sapp, associate professor of sociology-agriculture.

Henroid said he got the idea by talking to different people at a conference, when trying to create a FDA virtual reference desk. The idea was to create a centralized area to answer common questions about food safety, he said.

Sapp said the Web site, www.extension.iastate.edu/foodsafety, offers a wide variety of advice on food safety.

The project has taken about a year to plan and research, Henroid said. It started last fall with a grant from the Department of Agriculture. The whole site is supported by the USDA, he said.

Henroid worked more than a year to create a National Food Safety Web site. The first phase was shown at the 2002 Farm Progress Show on Monday.

The Web site was piped into the field where the Farm Progress Show took place, Henroid said. There were two terminals where the Web site could be tried out, and about 30,000 people were expected to be at the Farm Progress Show, he said.

There are Web sites that answer questions about food safety but none of them are centralized, Henroid said. He said most of the Web sites require that an e-mail be sent to a person and then that person replies back.

A centralized Web site can be time-saving especially for seasonal questions. Henroid said in the next couple of months there will to be questions about cooking turkeys because of Thanksgiving.

The site has attracted about 500 questions since it was created, he said. Three hundred of the questions and answers are available to the public.

The site is in its second phase, which involves recruiting experts to give advice, Henroid said.

A formal survey was done on food-safety sites. Then an advisory board was put together that consisted of government officials, other institutions and industries, Henroid said. Software for the site was purchased from Rightnow Technologies in Montana, he said.