Food irradiation has been marred by decades of problems, ranging from chronic food quality problems to company bankruptcy to weak consumer sales, and has little chance of becoming a mainstream solution for preventing food-borne illness, according to a new report released today by two consumer groups. The groups, the Center for Food Safety and Food and Water Watch, urged the government to abandon its costly support for irradiation, citing the many failures of this controversial technology.
Contradicting the public relations spin from the food irradiation industry, the report, Gross Failure, provides extensive scientific research on the often-gruesome effects that radiation has on food quality. Then it details the futile attempts to market irradiated foods to shoppers and unsuspecting school children. A copy of the report is at the link below.
“Irradiation is ‘history’ simply because it has no future,” said Wenonah Hauter, director of Food and Water Watch. “We’ve witnessed commercial failure after commercial failure in this industry, and we can’t understand why our government is still pushing a technology that consumers don’t want, scientists have warned us away from due to potential long-term health risks, and investors steer clear of year after year.”
Irradiation exposes food to high doses of ionizing radiation, either from electricity or radioactive cobalt-60, a nuclear waste, to kill potentially harmful bacteria and extend shelf life. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has legalized irradiation for many types of foods, including fruit, vegetables, beef, poultry, pork, eggs, shellfish, spices and juice.
Ironically, irradiation - long promoted as a food preservation technology - can actually ruin the flavor, odor, texture and color of common foods. According to the science cited in Gross Failure they can smell “rotten,” “metallic” and “bloody”; taste like “singed hair,” “burnt feathers” and “rancid fat”; and turn to “off” colors. Irradiated oysters, which the FDA legalized last August, can give off a yellow, saliva-like, excretion.
Efforts to sell irradiated foods to U.S. consumers over the past 50 years have met with rejection. Not a single public school district has ordered irradiated ground beef from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which has heavily promoted it since legalizing it for schools in 2003. In fact, after irradiated ground beef was approved for the USDA’s meal program, the public outcry generated a campaign that led to irradiated foods being banned altogether in 12 school districts across the United States. Further, four large irradiation plants shut down in recent years due to poor sales and public opposition.
“Ruined food means ruined food companies,” said Peter Jenkins, Policy Analyst with the Center for the Food Safety. “Not only is the quality of irradiated food worse, an irradiated item typically costs 20 to 30% more than the same unirradiated product. Consumers won’t pay that.”
Click here to view the report
