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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Is it in the tomatoes? The peppers? Perhaps the cilantro? Apparently, your guess of a random salsa ingredient may be as good as the FDA’s. Unfortunately, this is no game. Over 1000 cases of the recent salmonella strain have been reported while the hunt for the source continues.

The lack of progress and the inability to contain the spread of this bacterium for over a month now reveals the frightening state of the American food industry’s procedures and the Federal Government's food inspection system.  Instead of requesting the additional funds needed to hire more FDA food inspectors, Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt would like to turn more of the inspection responsibilities over to the industry so that it can police itself.

This far-reaching problem not only threatens the health of citizens but that of the entire nation. It has resulted in significant losses to the economy. With the sinking of tomato sales, many farmers even resorted to allowing their crops to rot in order to save the money they would have otherwise spent in harvesting them for probably nothing.

''What Hurricane Katrina was to FEMA, this salmonella outbreak is going to be to the FDA,'' said one tomato grower.

Deplorably, this outbreak isn’t surprising. According to the CDC, illnesses caused by tainted food affect close to a quarter of the country’s population each year. Sick to your stomach yet?

This recent scare only further implicates the obvious and urgent need for action in order to improve the systems that are supposed to ensure our food’s safety. Read more about the issue here.

Have you cut tomatoes and peppers from your diet? Personally, I've been buying only local peppers and cherry or grape tomatoes. I look forward to a time where we can once again enjoy salsa without thinking about this nasty little thing called salmonella. Each of us can help bring that day closer: tell the FDA that it's long overdue for a system makeover.

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Summertime is perfect for BBQs, and Wegmans – a regional supermarket chain – has an interesting recipe for “cooking” hamburgers. Wonder why cooking is in quotes? In a BBQ hamburger recipe on their website, it is recommended to use three pounds of irradiated ground beef, cook the burgers until desired doneness, and if you’re using non-irradiated beef, cook to 160 degrees. 

This means Wegmans is telling consumers that irradiated beef doesn’t have to be cooked to 160 degrees, which contradicts the U.S. Department of Agriculture guidance that ALL ground beef should be cooked to that temperature. Take a glance at the photo in the recipe…does that burger look cooked to you?

This is not the first time Wegmans grocery stores has used misleading advertising about the safety of undercooked irradiated meat. Despite being reprimanded by the USDA last year for improperly telling consumers they could undercook irradiated meat,  Wegmans is still on a mission to convince consumers that irradiation is the silver bullet for foodborne illness.

In a recent store flyer, Wegmans told customers that irradiated beef is "insurance against…E. coli." But irradiating meat does not necessarily kill all of the bacteria, nor does it sterilize the meat. There is also still a chance of cross-contamination from handling the meat in the processing plant or even in your own kitchen. Furthermore, food irradiation, a process whereby food is exposed to gamma rays, x-rays, or electron-beams to kill off bacteria, creates its own problems. Recent studies have shown that irradiating food may promote cancer development, cause genetic damage, and deplete vitamins.

Despite all of the evidence against the safety of irradiation, Wegmans grocery store has been one of its most vocal supporters, and has been pushing the technology any way they can.  You can tell Wegmans to stop misinforming the public about the safety of irradiated beef by signing a letter to the store.

And next time you’re at a backyard BBQ, ask where your meat’s from and make sure it’s cooked properly.

Hopefully your meal won’t be moving on your plate.

What in the world does irradiation – zapping the life, essence, and nutrients out of our food – have to do with global trade?

Everything. Bombarding fruits, veggies and meat with ionizing radiation that busts molecules and begets new types of matter is part of the global agribusiness agenda to remake farms, both here and abroad, into factories. The corporate cadre’s relentless drive for maximizing profit demands that the mass manufacture of food happen in countries with cheap labor costs and non-existent environmental rules.

Our political leaders and their big business handlers sing the praises of corporate-managed trade, which the media they own prefer to call free trade. Sounds better. They don’t tell us about the fly-infested fruit shipped across the Pacific or the filthy meat trucked over the border. They don’t have to. Irradiation will mask any grossness covering the imported food.

The World Bank works hand-in-hand with the World Trade Organization to pressure developing nations to grow cash crops to export to rich countries. The idea behind the export-oriented orthodoxy is that developing countries could use earnings from selling cotton or cocoa beans to buy imported corn or wheat. Of course, it is an advantage for giant food corporations that are looking for the cheapest place to buy the raw commodities they need. Free trade encourages farmers to abandon growing food to cultivate non-food cash crops like tea, rubber and coffee.

Today, almost half of the world’s population grows food for their families and communities. They grow staples and a mix of diverse crops. They have developed their own seed varieties, fertilizers, and pest management. They live in communities where the concept of the commons is strong, resulting in shared seeds, water, and labor. Unfortunately, this kind of local self-sufficiency is scorned by multinational corporations and the institutions they influence.

Jayson Cainglet, a Filipino activist working to stop irradiation and save family farming in the Philippines, spoke about this in the new book Zapped! Irradiation and the Death of Food: “Irradiation, if widely adopted, will facilitate this type of food production. Irradiation is designed to cover up inherent problems in production methods that agribusiness employs, but small-scale farms do not rely on these technologies.”

-Robert Schubert
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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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Would you let a doctor zap one billion X-rays all at once through your body if you were injured? Would you let your food be treated with that same amount of radiation?

Whether poultry, meat, fruit or vegetable, food around the world is being exposed to high doses of radiation under the veil of protecting consumers from foodborne illness.  Zapped! Irradiation and the Death of Food, a new book by Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter and researcher Mark Worth,  explores why this process, known as food irradiation, poses numerous health risks to consumers and ignores the fundamental problems plaguing food production systems.

Watch this video of Wenonah Hauter reading at th book launch at DC cafe Busboys & Poets, and learn more about this dangerous technology.

- Erin Greenfield
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Hey all you DC/Metro foodies and water warriors:  We want to let you know about an exciting event tomorrow night in DC!

On Thursday, June 5, 2008, Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter will be reading from and signing copies of her new book, Zapped! Irradiation and the Death of Food.

This is a groundbreaking book that reveals irradiation as a decades-long PR stunt by the food industry, aimed at increasing profits, not food safety. Ms. Hauter chronicles the rise of food irradiation in America and explains the science-and the politics-behind it. 

The event will be held at Busboys & Poets, at 14th and V Streets NW (map), from 6:30 to 8:30 on Thursday the 5th. Please come join us for an evening of information, and learn how to fight back to keep your food safe.

Learn more about the book and Ms. Hauter and buy the book now.

Looking forward to seeing you there!