When the Food and Drug Administration announced in December that its Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point regime was being applied to the seafood industry, it sounded like a pretty good deal.

The old way — confrontational spot checks of nervous processors by grouchy government inspectors — would give way to a friendly, science-based, preventative system that put everyone on the same team. Potential dangers would be identified and addressed. Sound, common-sense measures and thorough record-keeping would ensure safe seafood now and forever. Al Gore gushed about what an ounce of prevention is worth. Donna Shalala said it marked the start of a new era of cooperation, a veritable marriage, between food processors and government regulators.

Try telling that to Maine’s crab pickers.

In its application to this home-based, part-time enterprise, there is nothing friendly, cooperative, scientific or even systematic about HACCP. To the 500 or so — mostly women, mostly Down East — who pick and sell crab meat as one of the many seasonal jobs that make up an eked-out existence, this ounce of prevention carries an awfully high price tag.

A required training course (taught not by federal or state food safety experts, but by a private consulting firm) lasts from one to three days, depending upon how much information the instructor cares to impart. It costs from $100 to $175, depending upon whatever. The amount of record-keeping required varies, again with the particular instructor as the variable. Some pickers were told they would have to dedicate a room of their house solely for crab picking or build an addition, others were told the existing kitchen is OK, as long as it meets sanitation standards, has a stainless-steel sink, thermometers and a separate refrigerator for the crab meat.

So Maine Agriculture Commissioner Ed McLaughlin (his department is responsible for carrying out this federal mandate) has been on the road this week, meeting with pickers, catching a lot of flak. He’s heard about one inspector who knows so little about crab picking he assumed the inspectee earned $50,000 a year, making that remodeling project feasible. He’s heard a lot about the mixed messages and contradictory information. He’s been reminded again and again that a crab picker’s kitchen is invariably much cleaner than any factory, that outbreaks of food-borne illness generally are a corporate affair. And he’s been warned that HACCP as it stands either will drive these hard-working folks out of business or it will drive this entire business underground, where it cannot be inspected at all.

McLaughlin deserves credit for meeting these justifiably irate pickers face-to-face and for promising to fix things. But McLaughlin’s department and the FDA have a lot of work to do if they are sincere about allaying the pickers’ primary concern that HACCP is a weapon designed to eliminate home-based food processing altogether.

The principles of HACCP are fine, the cooperative approach certainly is preferable to antagonism. But the specific rules clearly were designed with the factory in mind, not the home kitchen. The responsible state and federal agencies have an obligation to see to it that not one crab picker who provides a clean product and who is willing to make a reasonable investment is shut down.