Nuked Food Makes it to Grocery Shelves

Don't blame Tom Harkin for being fooled. He was just trying to tell a good story.

On a fall day back in 1985, Harkin, newly elected Democratic senator from Iowa, told his former colleagues on a House subcommittee about how, while serving as a Navy jet pilot during the 1960s, he lived on pork that had been treated with radiation, ostensibly to make it safer to eat by killing harmful bacteria.

"I can remember eating some processed meat -- I think it was bacon or ham -- that had been irradiated and kept on the shelf in a vacuum-sealed package. I think it was preserved for seven years," Harkin told the panel, which was debating a food irradiation bill at the time. "We ate it, and I had never heard of such a thing. I thought to myself at the time, 'Why aren't we pursuing things like this?'"

Harkin's fascination surely would have been doused had someone leaned over and told him that in 1968, the year after he left the Navy, it was revealed that rats fed irradiated food by military scientists died younger, gained less weight, and apparently grew more tumors than rats fed normal food.

Fooled once.

Later that fall day, the House subcommittee heard an American Medical Association official proclaim that using radiation to rid food of bacteria "is not a public safety hazard, and I can't emphasize that strongly enough."

Too bad no one was there to remind the fellow that just a year earlier, he wondered in a memo to his AMA colleagues whether irradiated food might harm the offspring of animals (not to mention humans) who eat it, create mutant radiation-resistant bacteria, or sicken people who eat the stuff for long periods of time.

Fooled twice.

Since that hearing in 1985, Americans have been fooled time and time again -- by government bureaucrats, and food and nuclear industry executives trying to sell irradiation as a way to kill E. coli, Salmonella and other food-borne pathogens, while extending the shelf life (and, thus, the global market reach) of meat, fruit, vegetables, spices and prepared foods such as TV dinners and baby food.

Like salespeople, though, they're not telling the whole truth. Information that could help citizen/consumers make better decisions -- information about how irradiation depletes nutrients in food, causes health problems in laboratory animals, spawns mutant life forms, kills beneficial microorganisms, turns some food rancid, marginalizes already struggling family farmers, encourages the proliferation of nuclear technology, and masks filthy slaughterhouse conditions that foul meat with feces, urine, and pus -- has been craftily excised from the public debate.

While an all-out scientific and philosophical war is being waged over genetically engineered food, federal officials and corporate interests such as Kraft, Tyson and Wal-Mart are quietly attempting to legalize and commercialize an under-tested, over-hyped technology -- which claims to make food safer by zapping it with the equivalent of tens of millions of x-rays -- that could pose just as many dangers to the public. If not more.

Listening to the Past

Though it was fully 100 years ago that an MIT professor discovered that radiation could be harnessed to kill bacteria in food, it wasn't until the 1950s -- under President Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace initiative (which also promised that nuclear power would be "too cheap to meter") -- that food irradiation began to nudge toward the mainstream. But once the procedure started to gain popularity, it didn't take long for problems to crop up.

That pork that a young Tom Harkin ate when he was in the Navy? Turned out it might not have been safe after all. Military-sponsored tests yielded all sorts of nasty problems in lab animals fed irradiated food. A short time later, three executives of the firm hired by the military to research irradiation during the 1970s were convicted of doing fraudulent work. No matter. The federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) continued to allow potatoes and wheat flour to be irradiated and fed to the public.