Irradiation

Nuked Food Makes it to Grocery Shelves

Though it was fully 100 years ago that an MIT professor discovered that radiation could be harnessed to kill bacteria in food, it wasn't until the 1950s -- under President Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace initiative (which also promised that nuclear power would be "too cheap to meter") -- that food irradiation began to nudge toward the mainstream. But once the procedure started to gain popularity, it didn't take long for problems to crop up.

Military-sponsored tests yielded all sorts of nasty problems in lab animals fed irradiated food. A short time later, three executives of the firm hired by the military to research irradiation during the 1970s were convicted of doing fraudulent work. No matter. The federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) continued to allow potatoes and wheat flour to be irradiated and fed to the public.

With the government's blessing -- if not its encouragement -- the private sector started to get into the act. Given the spotty record of companies using radiation to sterilize medical supplies, however, one wonders how the government could have allowed them to start irradiating food. From 1974 to 1989, there were 45 recorded accidents at US irradiation plants. Among the worst:

* In 1977 a worker at the Radiation Technology plant in Rockaway, New Jersey, received a near-fatal dose of radiation, after which company president Martin Welt ordered staffers to give false information to federal investigators. After some 32 violations for such offenses as throwing out radioactive garbage with the regular trash, Welt was forced to resign (though the government soon after hired him as a $100-an-hour consultant and he eventually started another irradiation company.)

* In 1982 cobalt-tainted water was flushed down the public sewer system at the International Nutronics plant in Dover, New Jersey, leading to the federal conviction of a company executive who tried to cover up the incident.

* From 1985-99 the Neutron Products plant in Dickerson, Maryland was cited for 192 safety and other violations. The place was so hot with radiation that a company vice president's contaminated clothes set off an alarm at a New York nuclear plant he was visiting in 1988.

* In 1988 a Hanford-harvested capsule of cesium-137 sprung a leak at the Radiation Sterilizes plant in Decatur, Georgia. The ensuing cleanup cost taxpayers more than $45 million.

Government officials and industry execs still hold out hope that cesium-137 will find a niche in the food irradiation market, despite the Decatur disaster -- and despite the deaths of four people in Goiania, Brazil, whose bodies were buried in lead-lined caskets after they mistakenly handled radioactive cesium in 1987.

This spring, Wal-Mart -- the largest retailer on Earth with $160 billion in annual sales -- began test-marketing irradiated meat to its customers. Wal-Mart is buying the products from meat-packing giant IBP, which zapped them at an e-beam facility in Sioux City, Iowa, operated by Titan Corp., an erstwhile defense contractor notorious for its polluted iron plant in Keasbey, New Jersey. Titan is also irradiating meat for Tyson, Cargill-owned Excel, and Philip Morris-owned Kraft, among other major players in the ever-consolidating, ever-globalizing meat industry. En ligne acheter du zovirax en France.

Corporate giants are also showing up on the research end of things. For instance, work at the Illinois Institute of Technology, one of the nation's leading irradiation research installations, is funded by Coca-Cola, ConAgra, Kraft, Nestle, and Pepsico. And, many "food safety" advocacy groups throwing their weight behind irradiation are actually industry front organizations. The corporate-funded American Council on Science and Health, for example, is chaired by A. Alan Moghissi, whose anti-environment and anti-consumer positions include fighting the removal of asbestos from schools and proclaiming that higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a good thing for the agriculture industry.

Funny, the food industry hasn't always been unified in its support of food irradiation. Just seven years ago, the editors of Meat & Poultry magazine took the technology to task, warning that it should not be embraced as a panacea to protect people from contaminated food. "To think we can literally cram irradiation down the throats of consumers because it is the 'right' answer to our problems," the editors wrote, "is to step on the opinion of the very people we depend on for survival."

Mark Worth is senior researcher at Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program.

For more information on food irradiation, call Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program at , or visit www.nonukedfood.org.

Reprinted with permission from www.alternet.org.