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Washington Post Article - Dispelling Myths About FoodIrradiation
Dispelling Myths About Food Irradiation
By Lawrence Lindner
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday , March 28, 2000 ; Z11
If the idea of irradiated food made you uncomfortable before, you're going to be even more inclined to reject it now. After all, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released its new proposal for a federal definition of the term "organic" this month, it said an organic food could not be an irradiated food. Surely, then, there must be something unsafe, something nuclear or radioactive, about goods exposed to the irradiation process.
Well, no, there isn't. In fact, irradiation is so safe that it has been endorsed by such diverse entities as the World Health Organization, the United Nations, the U.S. Public Health Service and the American Medical Association. Consider, too, that some hospitals and nursing homes feed irradiated food to burn victims and chemotherapy patients because such immunologically compromised people are particularly prone to infections from bacteria that irradiation destroys. Moreover, astronauts have been washing down irradiated food with their Tang since 1972. And everything from milk cartons to contact lenses to teething rings to intravenous lines has been irradiated for many years.
Why the widespread confidence in the safety of irradiation? For one thing, it's simply untrue that irradiation makes food radioactive. Rather, it is simply exposed to what is known as ionizing radiation. Granted, that radiation comes from radioactive materials--cobalt 60 or cesium 137. But the food never touches the radioactive energy source. Moreover, the rays pass through the food as they kill harmful bacteria such as salmonella and E. coli rather than remain in it.
Irradiation also doesn't create cancer-causing compounds, as many people assume. It creates what are known as radiolytic byproducts. And while the sound of that term may conjure up a glow-in-the-dark quality, it simply refers to compounds that have been broken up (lysis) by radiant energy (radio). Such compounds are not unique to irradiation. They occur naturally in foods, too--and sometimes in much higher doses.
Then, too, irradiation doesn't diminish food's nutritional quality. The small vitamin losses that occur are virtually the same as the small vitamin losses that occur with lower-tech food processing techniques such as canning.
The environmental hazards of irradiation have been overplayed as well. Unlike a nuclear power plant, an irradiation plant uses too little energy--and creates too little heat--to cause an atom to fissure and create a mushroom-cloud explosion.
Granted, some have raised concerns that there could be an accident in transporting radioactive materials to or from irradiation facilities or perhaps as a result of radioactive leakage from a plant. But in the 50 or so years that medical supplies and various foods have undergone irradiation, there has not been a single nuclear accident in which a finger could be pointed at irradiation materials.
And such an accident is only going to become more unlikely. Some new irradiation plants can now zap food with electricity rather than radioactive compounds. In other words, the energy used to kill harmful bacteria will come from electron beams rather than gamma rays. That's the case, in fact, with a new plant in Iowa that will soon be irradiating hamburger patties--a boon for those who like their burgers rare and bacteria-free.
So why, then, can't an organic food also be an irradiated food? Part of it comes down to "consumer expectations," explains Kate Clancy, director of the Agriculture Policy Project at the Henry Wallace Institute for Alternative Agriculture in Greenbelt. Indeed, even the USDA acknowledges that allowing organic food to be irradiated could put producers of organics "at a trade disadvantage" both in the United States and overseas: Consumers looking to buy organic goods wouldn't have faith that an "organic" label means what they assume it should mean.
But it's hardly just a matter of dollars and cents. There's a philosophy at stake here, too.
"The idea [in organics] is to leave food as close as possible to the form in which it comes from the field," says Joan Dye Gussow, an appointee to the National Organic Standards Board, whose purpose is to assist the secretary of agriculture in developing organic standards. "You try to produce food as much in harmony with nature as possible."
Admittedly, Gussow comments, "when you have to quantify what it means to be working in harmony with nature--that's really, really tough." But, she remarks, "it's the essence of an anti-organic process when you use [high-energy] bombardment on a food." It goes against the "minimally processed" aim of organic food production.
Just as important for the organics movement, using irradiation to kill bacteria on food skirts the issue of why food has become so contaminated in the first place. That is, an objection to defining irradiated food as "organic" is only one narrowly focused point of entry into concerns about failings throughout the entire food production system. Perhaps Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, puts it best when he points out that in the case of meat, at least, much of the harmful bacteria is caused by "close confinement of animals, excreta everywhere, extremely fast rates of slaughter that sometimes result in the dispersal of fecal material"--in short, inhumane treatment of livestock coupled with environmentally unsound practices that leave what Jacobson calls "huge amounts of manure" piled up.
Of course, none of that jibes with organic food producers' tenets about respect for animals and the land. Thus, in a sense, using irradiation is anti-organic because it doesn't get to the root of a problem that's entirely anti-organic in nature.
"If there were rules for how much space each animal had to roam, reductions in line speed at the slaughterhouse," Jacobson says, "we wouldn't need this expensive system [of irradiation] to prevent food poisoning. We'd have clean meat."
Others agree. Says Gussow, "We have filthy meat because we have filthy meat production procedures." It's for that reason that Katherine DiMatteo, executive director of the Greenfield, Mass.-based Organic Trade Association, says irradiation is not necessary in the treatment of food--a criterion for whether an ingredient or process may be considered organic.
How can the cleanliness of food be addressed earlier in the production process, other than by giving animals more space to roam? Diane Hastings, a physician's assistant in Potomac who wrote a dissertation on irradiation while earning a doctorate in nutrition and public health from Columbia University Teachers College, says the thing to do is keep everything as clean as possible throughout the manufacturing of food--from farm to table. You shouldn't have to use complicated technological solutions, she argues, if you conduct regular inspections for cleanliness at all parts of a food production system. That in itself would eliminate 90 percent of harmful bacteria on food, she says.
At meat and poultry production plants, she adds, "we've only just begun" to overhaul the inspection process. For instance, this is the first year that all meat and poultry plants have to comply with government regulations for inspections at various points in the production chain.
In other words, Hastings offers, "Before we take out the big guns of technology, let's do some good, clean business for a few years and see if that works." If a high risk of bacterial contamination still exists after the food production process has been cleaned up, then higher tech solutions deserve a second look.
Eating Right columnist Lawrence Lindner is executive editor of the Tufts University Health & Nutrition Letter.
======================
Jim Hardeman, Manager
Environmental Radiation Program
Environmental Protection Division
Georgia Department of Natural Resources
4244 International Parkway, Suite 114
Atlanta, GA 30354
(404) 362-2675 fax: (404) 362-2653
Jim_Hardeman@mail.dnr.state.ga.us
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