I’ve got a friend who works for a food irridation company and recently developed a product that will allow meat to sit on an unrefrigerated store shelf for three weeks. He claims that his boss has personally eaten a non-refrigerated three month-old piece of meat with no ill effects.
Interested (though slightly disgusted), I did some reading (OK, just a pamphlet from Whole Foods) that claims that there is evidence to support that irradiating foods 1) doesn’t necessarily kill everything (i.e. doesn’t penetrate the entire thickness of the food) 2) destroys a significant portion of the nutrients of the food and 3) may possibly create “bad things” (forget the term “Unknown Radiolytic Particles?”) that no one knows what the effects of eating are.
OK, no big problem, just cook the damn thing. At worst,it’s not the panacea that most people think.
Is this true? If so, I hope we don’t get into another microwave debate.
Has any research been done? Are these things bad? If so, how?
Also, how widespread is irradiating food?
Granted, the pamphlet really just asked for the readers to ask their reps to vote for better labelling requirements rather than an outright ban.
Interresting. Are you really sure that no refrigeration was going on? And what meat was it? The reason that I’m asking is that unless you have a very lean cut of, say, turkey, there are fats that will go rancid, even in a controlled atmosphere.
Most of the deterioration in a piece of meat is indeed due to bacterial decomposition, and if all bacteria can be killed, and then be kept out, it ought to be equally as efficient as canning. After all, canning is a tried and true method, and people have eaten 100 years old canned food.
I’m sure it penetrates all right, but there might be some cases of spores that can withstand rather high doses of radiation.
Apparently some vitamins can be ruined by really high doses, but that’s very minor.
Probably more widespread than you think! Quite a lot of spices are already irradiated. (It has been shown conclusively that the gasses that were used to sterilise spices were not very efficient, plus they were carcinogenic.)
One problem with food irradiation was highlighted (I believe) in Fast food nation*. If slaughterhouses know that the side of beef will be irradiated, they don’t bother to keep the food clean. If I get to choose between an irradiated pound of ground beef where the meat packer didn’t bother to clean out the stomach contents, and a packet that has no visible spoiling, despite not having been irradiated, I would probably choose the latter.
Probably the biggest problem with irradiation of food is public fear.
In theory, irradiation is just like canning, except that it uses gamma rays (or whatever) to kill the bacteria and other organisms that cause food to spoil and become unsafe to eat. As long as the influx of further pathogens is prevented (for example by totally sealing in plastic ), then I can easily believe your friend’s claim about the meat.
None of that makes me comfortable about the idea though, but most of my discomfort is not based on rational objections.
I do harbour the tiniest of fears that exposure to radiation might kill the bacteria, but might also do something along the lines of altering proteins, with the (probably incredibly rare) possibility of creating something nasty like prions.
My concern is not that the radiation will do something spooky, but that this is simply a technique for the industry to sell spoiled or mishandled food which doesn’t appear spoiled. And appearance is all I have to go on when shopping.
Imagine they were allowed to take 15-day old beef that had picked up that greeninsh cast & pungent stink and spray it with a red dye + fresh meat scent and put it back in the sales display? Most of us would want that practice banned as misleading. I see food irradiation, particularly meat irradiation, as the same idea.
We’ve all-but dismantled the oversight agencies in this country, and it’s just a matter of time before the 4 corporations which control 70% of US food produce some real public health problem in the interests of higher profits.
In the absence of effective oversight, we’ll have to resort to boycotts of things we can’t either trust or verify. Or suffer the consequences.
I dislike finding myself in the company of Luddites and nucleo-phobes, but sometimes people do the right thing for the wrong reason. Heed the sig line.
If you’re worried about irradiation, then you should ask yourself why you’re not also worried about cooking. Yes, irradiation can probably alter some proteins, and it might be able to denature some vitamins. But we’re already quite certain that heat (however applied, by microwave or hot air or grease or whatever) can also do those things. And, in fact, the changes produced by heat are similar qualitatively to those suspected of being produced by radiation, only on a much greater scale. One can never completely eliminate all the risk of irradiation (or of cooking, of course!): It’s always conceivable that some particular species of animal or plant contains some bizarre protein which, although harmless raw, becomes deadly poisonous when exposed to gamma rays or to heat. But then, of course, we must weigh this very small hypothetical risk against the very real, large, and known risk of food poisoning by bacteria.
Completely, absolutely, totally different. Food irradiation doesn’t just cause food to seem fresh. It causes it to actually stay fresh. If that beef had been irradiated to start with (and plastic-wrapped to prevent subsequent reinfection), it never would have picked up that greenish cast to begin with. In that regard, it’s no different than refrigeration or salting, both of which are also techniques to keep food wholesome for longer.
Yes and no. Depending on the thickness of the meat, the radiation most likely will NOT penetrate it entirely. However, if we’re talking about intact muscle tissue, like a steak (vs. say, ground beef), all of the dangerous organisms will be on the surface, so the radiation doesn’t need to penetrate completely in order to completely kill everything. So it DOES kill everything, without penetrating the entire thickness. Pork is the main exception to this rule, because the trichinosis organism lives in the interior of muscles.