Zapped

In another example of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration prioritizing industry interests over consumer safety, the agency announced last week that it will allow fresh spinach and iceberg lettuce to be treated with ionizing radiation. This just illustrates once again how misplaced this agency’s priorities really are, and how easily they cave in to industry pressure.

In fact since 2000, FDA has been working with industry representatives to fast track irradiation.   The National Food Processor’s Association (representing powerhouses such as Kraft Foods, Inc.) originally filed a petition to FDA to irradiate food ranging from sprouts and seeds, juices, frozen fruits and vegetables, to refrigerated ready-to-eat meat and poultry products (like deli and luncheon meats and hot dogs). But as soon as major E. coli outbreak was linked to California spinach in 2006, FDA asked the association to re-work their petition and separate the leafy greens from the rest of the food, in order to expedite the ruling.

Unfortunately FDA’s ruling on irradiation holds no water when it comes to preventing foodborne illness. Instead, irradiation is an impractical, ineffective and very expensive technology. Very little testing has been conducted on the safety and wholesomeness of irradiated vegetables, and from the small amount of research that exists, we know treating lettuce or spinach with the equivalent of tens of millions of chest X-rays can ruin its flavor, odor, texture, color, and nutritional value.

And if you’re thinking you can just avoid buying irradiated vegetables, think again. While FDA is saying that irradiated fresh produce will be labeled, the agency proposed a rule in 2007 that would destroy the current labeling requirements for irradiated food.  FDA could eliminate those requirements before the Bush Administration leaves office, leaving consumers in the dark.

Rather than pursuing irradiation, FDA needs to focus on how to address the cause of the problem -- contaminated water used to irrigate or process crops.
Allowing spinach and lettuce to be irradiated would simply mask unsafe production practices, while supplying lower quality, less nutritious and potentially hazardous food. Vegetable growers and processors should improve flawed sanitation practices and FDA should hire more inspectors to inspect vegetable-processing plants more thoroughly. American consumers expect more and deserve better than questionable ‘treatments’ like irradiation imposed by a weak FDA.

- Food & Water Watch
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You may have read about the meat industry’s fun new practice of using carbon monoxide (CO) to turn meat artificially red for an indefinite amount of time. This deceptive technology may not be harmful in itself, but prevents consumers from using their own sense of sight to choose fresh, healthy meat at the grocery store. Since the color can last up to a year, shoppers have no way of knowing if their meat is rotten till after they get it home and unwrapped, and notice a bad odor or slimy texture.

The next idea, presented by Dr. Joseph Sebranek, professor in the Department of Animal Science at Iowa State University, Ames, IA, on October 30, 2007 before the House Agriculture Committee, is to combine this technology with irradiation—a process that may be very harmful. When meat is irradiated, it can turn an unappetizing color—purplish or even greenish. But pump some CO in there, and meat is back to cherry-red—eliminating one indicator that allows consumers to steer clear of meat that’s been zapped.

The combination of these two technologies is the ultimate in treating the symptoms instead of the problem—masking bad meat with one techno-fix after another, rather than simply producing cleaner food. And get this—between the two, we can now extend the meat’s shelf life to… drumroll please… 38 days. Who would want to eat a cut of meat that’s well over a month old?  And the joke is that even after those 38 days after over, the meat will remain red—so we’ve got to rely on grocery chains to take perfectly good-looking meat off their shelves.

Gross.

-Erica Schuetz
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So, if Food & Water Watch’s reports haven’t already broken your gross-o-meter, give these next few paragraphs a read and check it again.

As you may know from yesterday’s blog, FDA is considering relaxing rules on irradiation, lifting labeling requirements or substituting the word “pasteurized.” The reason why they want to do this, though, is where the gag factor comes in. It’s so you can eat poo.

In the factory-farm meat production model, faster is always better. High production is the whole goal, so little things like sanitation and animal welfare can sometimes fall by the wayside. Remember that disturbing video the Humane Society put out a few months ago, leading to the massive Hallmark-Westland beef recall?  When a “downer” cow is pushed and dragged across the manure-covered floor of a facility before going to slaughter, and is possibly cut and injured, the resulting meat is contaminated with fecal matter, vomit, pus… you get the picture. The health result of this, also, is pretty much as gross as you’d imagine.

It would seem clear that the solution should begin right there in the plant, with improving conditions. But there’s another option—one that some industry players favor because it doesn’t threaten the crank-'em-out factory-farm model. Food irradiation kills most bacteria—so you don’t have to make sure the meat is clean. Just sterilize that poo!  Then we can just eat it. Yum!

In addition to likely being dirty, irradiated meat contains some chemicals that materialize during the irradiation process. The scariest substances, known as 2-ACBs (short for 2-alkylcyclobutanones, if you were wondering), have been linked to colon cancer, and have never been found anywhere in the world outside of irradiated meat. They’re formed when fat is exposed to radiation, and have been definitively identified in irradiated beef, chicken, pork, lamb, eggs, peanuts, salmon, mangoes, papayas, and more. FDA has never studied the potential health hazards of 2-ACBs, and scientists don’t know how the body metabolizes them. And that’s just one substance. Just, you might say, a taste of irradiation’s goodness…

Every story needs a moral, and this time it’s more like one of those old-school warning-style fairy tales. Basically, irradiating dirty meat doesn’t make it clean, and can even add bonus nasties that you’ve never even heard of.  But we hate to leave you simply with, “and then the wolf gobbled her up.”  There is, as always, our power as consumers. Since we currently have labeling for irradiated foods, we can make informed choices about the food we choose to purchase. And—for now—we can use our eyesight!  More on this next time…

-Erica Schuetz
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Carrying a box of copies of Zapped! downstairs the other day, my coworker Erin and I encountered a friendly man in the elevator. “What’s the name of your book there?” he asked, and once we showed him the cover, he hazarded, “Oh, like with microwaves, right?” Then we were on level 1 and our companion was continuing to the basement. We didn’t have time to explain the truth about food irradiation—namely, that it is not the same thing that happens in microwaves.

This is an understandable—and common—misperception. Most Americans today don’t know what food irradiation actually is. This is due in part to the success of activists, who have prevented the technology from becoming widely commercialized, and in part to industry hype that aims to keep people in the dark about what exactly happens to their food.

So to clarify: Hauter’s book explains that the distinction between irradiation and the types of radiation in microwaves, radio waves, infrared light, and visible light is that irradiation uses ionizing radiation. Non-ionizing radiation can cause molecules to vibrate and heat up—that’s what makes microwaves good for leftovers. But ionizing radiation has enough energy to blow apart molecules, which then go careening into other molecules, knocking them apart, till they are all flying around like crazy and can combine into new types of matter (more on this later in the week). When people are exposed to ionizing radiation, that same energy can explode DNA molecules, leading to leukemia and other types of cancer.

When food is exposed to ionizing radiation, it doesn’t hold up too well either.  Irradiation can wilt and discolor food, and cause it to smell and taste nasty—apparently comparisons have been made to "burned feathers" and "wet dog." Mmmmm. Nutritionally, irradiation is also a disaster, destroying up to 91% of Vitamin E, 90% of Vitamin C, 50% of Vitamin A, and 95% of Vitamin B1. So why would we do it?

The motivation for irradiating is industry-driven. Irradiation allows food producers to store food longer, ship it farther, and avoid cleaning up dirty conditions at food production facilities. This translates for consumers simply as older food, fewer vitamins, and continued risk of foodborne illness. Irradiation is ineffective against mad cow disease and several other threatening pathogens, so irradiating instead of improving sanitation at plants is simply paying lip service to food safety.

But it won’t kill you…right?  Actually, we don’t know. There just isn’t enough research. While there isn’t conclusive evidence that eating irradiated foods could have the same effects as being exposed to radiation itself, some studies seem to suggest it. Experiments on lab animals fed irradiated foods have shown ruptured hearts, sterility, blindness, internal bleeding, cancer, tumors, stillbirths, mutations, organ damage, immune system failure, stunted growth, and a host of other problems. Of course, conflicting studies exist that mysteriously show irradiated food as having no health effects whatsoever. So we’re not saying it will kill you…just that it might. But isn’t that bad enough?

Currently, it’s possible to partially avoid irradiated foods. Single-ingredient foods, like fruits or cuts of meat, must be labeled with the flower-like “radura” symbol to show they’ve been irradiated, and are also more costly than their non-irradiated counterparts. But ingredients in prepared food can be irradiated without disclosure, and over 95 million pounds of spices are already irradiated annually in the US. Plus, the FDA is now considering a decision to futher loosen labeling requirements on irradiated food, allowing it to be labeled as “pasteurized” in some cases, and in other cases to be sold without any labeling at all.

So, will we soon be facing supermarket shelves stocked completely with zapped foods?  Not if we can help it. It’s due in large part to consumer rejection of irradiated food till now that the technology isn’t more mainstream already. And we, as consumers, can continue to stand up for our right to safe foods—not zapped foods. And check back tomorrow for more on irradiation and its consequences.

-Erica Schuetz
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