June
2001
Nuclear
Lunch: While Activists Are Taking to the Streets to Fight Biotechnology,
Food Irradiation Might be the Real Enemy
By Mark Worth
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We are engaged in nothing short of a holy war over our
food supply. The days when food purely served the health and nutritional
needs of people are long over. Today, food is a commodity—in the
final analysis no different from video games, SUVs and cellphones—that
serves the profit needs of corporations, the most powerful of which
are multibillion-dollar transnationals that are unaccountable to the
people who depend on them to supply safe, wholesome food at a fair
price.
In the years to come, will our children and grandchildren be able to
enjoy locally produced food that maintains its nutritional integrity
and wholesomeness? Or will their food be produced halfway around the
Earth by multinational corporations using technologies that not only
render food tasteless and nutritionless, but that may do a body more
harm than good?
The doomsday scenario is frightening...but real. In the not-too-distant
future, nearly all of our food will be grown in faraway lands under
lax environmental and labor standards; handled in filthy slaughterhouses
and processing plants with blazing-speed conveyor belts under the eye
of few, if any, government inspectors; “treated” by irradiation
to extend shelf life and mask shoddy slaughtering and processing practices
that leave meat fouled by feces, urine, pus and vomit; and stored for
days or weeks on trucks, ships and trains until the food finally reaches
the market, where it arrives looking fresh but tasting and smelling
nothing like the way a normal apple or tomato should. Meanwhile, small-scale
farmers and ranchers will be driven to bankruptcy because they simply
will not be able to compete within this new economic world order.
Perhaps even more than genetic engineering, growth hormones, antibiotics
and other unnatural processes, irradiation holds the potential to fundamentally
alter the way food is grown, produced, distributed and marketed throughout
the world—for the worse. And, irradiation holds the potential
to allow huge, unaccountable multinational corporations to grow larger
and even more unaccountable.
Irradiated New World
Research into food irradiation dates to the Eisenhower-era “Atoms
for Peace” program, which also spawned research into nuclear-powered
airplanes, pacemakers, wristwatches, coffeepots and long-johns. In 1963
the Army won the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) permission
to feed irradiated bacon to military personnel serving in Vietnam and
elsewhere. Five years later, however, the FDA pulled the permit after
previously withheld Army documents revealed that lab animals suffered
premature death, a rare form of cancer, reproductive problems and blood
abnormalities after eating irradiated food. A member of Congress remarked
in disgust: “We were guinea pigs.”
In the 1970s, food irradiation attracted the interest of U.S. Energy
Department officials looking for “productive” uses for the
tens of millions of curies of highly radioactive, highly explosive cesium-137
being stored at nuclear bomb factories in South Carolina and Washington
state. The “Byproducts Utilization Project”—which also
endeavored to feed radiation-sterilized sewage sludge to livestock and
use it in fertilizer—debuted in failure in 1988, when a cesium-137
cask sprung a leak at an irradiation facility near Atlanta, leading
to a $50 million, taxpayer-funded cleanup.
Quietly, plans to use cesium-137 for food irradiation are still in the
works. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is funding research into a
cesium irradiator being developed by a New Jersey company.
In another unseemly military-civilian conversion project, the Titan
Corporation of San Diego has adapted a linear accelerator originally
designed for the “Star Wars” program to irradiate food with
speed-of-light electrons. Among the food industry giants that have contracted
with Titan to irradiate their products are Cargill, Del Monte, IBP,
Omaha Steaks, Tyson and Kraft. Collectively, Titan’s clients hold
three-fourths of the $60 billion U.S. beef market, and more than half
of the total $100 billion market of all meat.
Though cesium-137 is not currently being used commercially to irradiate
food, another radioactive material that emits gamma rays is being used
to “treat” food destined for supermarket shelves: cobalt-60,
which is primarily used in nuclear medicine. In addition to glowing-blue
cobalt-60 and electron-firing linear accelerators, X-ray machines are
also being used and, because of their ability to penetrate deeply into
large containers, they are becoming the method of choice among large
agribusiness companies.
Whether “treated” by radioactive materials, linear accelerators
or X-ray machines, food exposed to the equivalent of up to one billion
chest X-rays (yes, that’s billion) isn’t really food anymore.
For example, vitamins have been depleted—up to 80 percent of the
vitamin A in eggs, and half of the beta-carotene in orange juice. Proteins
and essential fatty acids have been disrupted. Flavor, odor and texture
have been corrupted. Bizarre chemicals—including several known
and suspected carcinogens and mutagens—have been formed. And beneficial
microorganisms, such as the yeasts and molds that help keep botulism
at bay, have been killed.
Not surprisingly, a vast body of research dating to the 1950s suggests
that irradiated food is not safe for human consumption. Lab animals
fed irradiated food have suffered a wide range of serious problems:
genetic aberrations, such as blood abnormalities in mammals and extra
wings in fruit flies; reproductive problems, such as stillbirths and
small litters; nutritional deficiencies; and high levels of radioactivity
in the organs and excrement of mammals.
In one of the few experiments ever conducted on humans, children fed
irradiated wheat in India during the 1970s suffered a chromosomal aberration
called polyploidy, which has been associated with leukemia and other
forms of cancer.
These problems have been systematically dismissed by the U.S. government
and international health organizations. Since 1983, in fact, the FDA
has legalized the irradiation of spices, fruit, vegetables, poultry,
red meat, eggs, juice and sprouting seeds, while ignoring many of the
agency’s own safety regulations. In none of these rulings, for
instance, did the FDA determine a level of radiation to which these
foods can be exposed and still be safe to eat.
The well-documented health problems associated with irradiated food
have also been ignored by the World Health Organization (WHO), which,
since the 1960s, has issued numerous reports extolling the safety of
irradiated food. With the WHO’s endorsement, not only the U.S.
but the European Union and countries throughout Africa, Asia, South
America and the Middle East have legalized the irradiation of a growing
list of foods. Though most EU countries have bans or very tight restrictions
on irradiated food, the European Commission is planning to override
these national laws with a new EU-wide regulation.
Unbeknownst to them, many Americans have been eating irradiated spices
and other foods for more than a decade, because federal labeling laws
do not require companies to tell consumers when processed foods contain
irradiated ingredients. Additionally, restaurants, schools, hospitals,
nursing homes, prisons and other institutions are not required to inform
people when they are eating irradiated food.
The only irradiated foods that must be labeled as such are whole foods
sold in stores—such as fresh produce, pork chops, orange juice
and the like. These foods must carry the phrase “Treated by irradiation”
and the international symbol for irradiation, called the “radura”—which
is the main reason that so few of these products are on sale.
Irradiated beef and chicken went on public sale for the first time
about a year ago, in Florida and several Midwestern states. Several
varieties
of irradiated fruit and vegetables—such as papayas from Hawaii—are
available in stores, but in small quantities in only a few parts of
the country. Beyond the labeling loopholes, tracking the sale of irradiated
food is a challenge because grocery store inventory records do not
have
to be released to the public.
Though the food industry is looking to irradiation as a panacea for
food safety problems that seem to be growing more difficult and complex
by the day, this hasn’t always been the case. Eight years ago,
the editors of Meat & Poultry magazine took irradiation to task,
warning that the food industry shouldn’t view the technology as
a silver-bullet solution: “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.”
With food industry executives and government officials evangelizing
in unison for irradiation, it is, in fact, only we the consumers who
can stop this technology from being crammed down our throats.
Mark Worth is a senior researcher with
Public Citizen’s Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program
in Washington, D.C. For more information, call 202-454-5123 or visit www.citizen.org/cmep.
