Reject irradiated food

IT'S BEEN ALMOST exactly 19 years since the Bay Guardian first broke the story of how the federal government and the nuclear industry were trying to get into the business of zapping food with gamma rays to kill bacteria and fight disease (see "The New Hot Potato," 2/27/85). At the time it seemed like some science-fiction fantasy gone mad: the people who brought us the Three Mile Island disaster, who were contaminating the ground and water at weapons-processing plants in Colorado, Washington, and South Carolina, and who were building up mountains of highly toxic waste with no place to store it and no way to contain it were about to get their hands on the U.S. food supply.

A national coalition, led by San Francisco labor activist Denis Mosgofian, worked to alert the public to the dangers of the practice and managed to slow down wholesale implementation. As Mosgofian points out in an opinion on this page, there is no large-scale food-irradiation infrastructure in the United States.

The government and the nuke makers didn't give up, and they've managed to get approval for all sorts of irradiation programs. But the public has never really bought into the plan. Given the choice between irradiated meat and meat that hasn't been dosed with the equivalent of 15 million chest X rays, consumers generally buy the nonnuclear stuff. That's why the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently approved the use of irradiated food in school lunches: the kids don't have a choice.

But the San Francisco Board of Education does. As Rachel Brahinsky reported last week (see "Hot Lunch," 1/28/04), board member Mark Sanchez has introduced a measure opposing the use of irradiated food in San Francisco schools. Berkeley and Los Angeles have already banned the stuff, and San Francisco should too.

There are all sorts of scientific arguments about the safety and quality of irradiated food. Some studies have shown that the process destroys essential nutrients. Consumer Reports says meat that's been nuked has "a slight but distinct off-taste and smell ... [like] singed hair." And while almost everyone agrees that irradiation does, in fact, kill bacteria, so do soap and water and proper cooking. In fact, decent safety standards in agribusiness (and monitoring by the USDA) would make all of this far less necessary.

The whole thing reminds us of physicist Amory Lovins's critique of nuclear power: "It's like cutting butter with a chain saw." Wholesale irradiation requires large amounts of dangerous material that puts workers and the environment at risk. It provides a publicly funded subsidy to an industry that has ignored health and safety concerns for more than half a century. It forces kids to eat unappetizing and possibly nutritionally deficient food – and for what? Largely, it appears, to protect the agribusiness industry from having to implement decent food-safety practices.

Food irradiation makes no sense and doesn't belong in S.F. schools. The board should adopt Sanchez's resolution and send the nuke makers packing.