\doc\web\97\10\irrfood.txt Subject: WSJ piece (12/10/97) Michael Fumento American Enterprise Institute 1150 17th Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20036 202-862-5943 fax 862-7178 mfumento@aei.org Copyright 1997 by Michael Fumento December 9, 1997 The Wages of Food Irradiation Delay: Decades of Death by Michael Fumento "Frozen foods are antedated, ask for yours-IRRADIATED!" declared an enthusiastic rhyme in Science Digest. "After more than 20 years, irradiated food may be coming out of the deep freeze," another magazine stated. The years of those statements were 1957 and 1981, respectively. Yet this life-saving food preservation process that has only now been approved by the FDA use on red meat. And for other foods it's already been approved for, it goes virtually unused. Why? Why have people been allowed to sicken and die and food to needlessly rot? The answer is a cautionary tale of what happens when environmentalism and technophobia reign over science. Each year, about 9,000 Americans die of food poisoning. Nobody knows exactly how many can be prevented with irradiation. But safe to say three of the biggest killers campylobacter, salmonella, and E. coli--are readily destroyed by irradiation and even one irradiation opponent, Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) has granted it could save thousands of lives a year from bacteria-infected chicken alone. The irradiation process uses gamma rays from cobalt-60, electron beams fired from machines, or other systems to bombard food with varying levels of ionizing radiation. Depending on the level, it can do anything from greatly retarding the spoilage of fruits and vegetables to killing disease-causing micro-organisms in meat. (It's also commonly used to sterilize medical instruments). Almost 40 countries use food irradiation and over the years it has picked up the blessings of such groups as the World Health Organization (WHO), American Gastroenterological Association, the United Nations' Food and Agricultural Organization, and agriculture secretaries for both Republican and Democratic presidents. While other methods of foods preservation have simply been grandfathered in with little or no study, researchers around the world have scrutinized food irradiation for decades, producing hundreds of studies. Almost two decades ago, the WHO declared, "All the toxicological studies carried out on a large number of irradiated foods, from almost every type of food commodity, have produced no evidence of adverse effects as a result of irradiation." Nobody has been more vociferous in advocating food irradiation than scientists at the FDA. Yet FDA agency heads have dragged their feet on the approval process since they were given jurisdiction over it 40 years ago, slowly--oh, so slowly--approving one food type at a time for irradiation. Yet even these approvals have been little more than symbolic. Threats of public campaigns and pickets against food processors and stores considering selling irradiated food, along with horrifying claims of anti-irradiation activists, have made it practically impossible to buy irradiated food in this country other than spices. People like Dennis Mosgofian, director of the National Coalition to Stop Food Irradiation (NCSFI) declare irradiation is "the massacre of the American food supply," while University of Illinois Professor Samuel S. Epstein, M.D., a favorite media source, has called it "extraordinarily dangerous" and the equivalent of "Russian Roulette." Powerful groups like CSPI and physician Sidney Wolfe's Public Citizen have fought it tooth and nail, using both petitions to the FDA and appeals directly to the people. Generally the arguments against food irradiation contain grains of truth, but were they applied to other food processing and preservation procedures would basically outlaw food entirely. Among these: * WORKERS MAY GET HURT ON THE JOB AT IRRADIATION PLANTS. "While irradiation does kill bacteria, it involves the use of inherently dangerous materials and poses its own risks to workers," CSPI's Jacobson has declared. "The U.S. irradiation industry has been plagued by a litany of accidents," claimed the leftist British magazine New Statesman and Society. Actually, the "litany" comprises about half a dozen minor accidents with no deaths among the nearly forty U.S. plants that had been operating for decades. On the other hand, each year, almost two million workers are hurt on the job, and 10,000 killed. Those who harvest our food, farmers, have three times the national job-related death rate. * IRRADIATION CREATES NEW CHEMICALS IN FOOD, AND WE DON'T ALWAYS KNOW WHAT THOSE CHEMICALS ARE. Yes, and the same is true of roasting, frying, broiling, and boiling. We don't even know the full chemical composition of most foods BEFORE they're irradiated. * IT'S POSSIBLE THAT SOME OF THE CHEMICALS CREATED DURING IRRADIATION MAY BE CARCINOGENIC. In fact, there's never been evidence of this for IRRADIATION. On the other hand, using the rodent testing favored by environmentalists, ALL traditional methods of cooking food have caused cancerous tumors and mutations. Other types of food preservation appear to be clear HUMAN carcinogens. The incredible 75 percent drop in stomach cancer rates in this country since the 1930s is generally attributed to a decline in the consumption of cured foods, especially salt-cured ones. * IRRADIATION IS DEADLY. "One hundred thousand rads of radiation they call low level," anti-nuclear activist and head of Food and Water, Inc., Walter Burnstein told a national TV audience. "Six hundred rads--as you know from Chernobyl--600 rads kills a person. One hundred thousand rads is going to be used in our apples." True. But yeast bread is normally baked at temperatures higher than 400 degrees Fahrenheit for about half an hour. Try surviving that. But it's the bread that's cooked, not you. It's the apple that's irradiated, not you. * THERE ARE NUTRIENT LOSSES. Explaining that vitamins can be destroyed during irradiation, Ellen Hass, executive director of Public Voice for Food & Health Policy and a former Under Secretary of Agriculture for President Clinton, said, "Consumers will be getting a bum deal when they have irradiated food." There is indeed some nutrient loss with irradiation, as with most methods of preserving, refining, and cooking food. When you boil a pot of vegetables and pour out the water, many of the vitamins go down the drain. Heat sterilization can knock out 90 percent of the vitamin B-1 (thiamine) in meats such as pork and ham, while even high-dose irradiation reduces it by less than 20 percent. When these arguments fail, opponents fall back on such silliness as Ralph Nader's populist claim that, "People are rebelling against it all over the country." Since virtually nobody's had access to irradiated food, there's never been anything to rebel AGAINST. What he could have accurately said is that until recent food poisoning scares, polls often showed Americans to be frightened of food irradiation. Why? Because Mr. Nader and his allies worked fastidiously to frighten them. Ultimately, there was only one card in the anti-irradiationists' hand, but it was an ace. Alluded to by Mr. Burnstein, it's the gut fear Americans have of radiation, a fear that began with Hiroshima and was reinforced at Chernobyl. It's a simple equation: "Radiation" plus "food" equals fear. There are two major ironies in the food irradiation delay. One is that "consumer choice" groups led the fight, even as they repeatedly refused to allow consumers to choose irradiated food even when it was clearly marked as such with symbols and large signs. Second, these decades of delay allegedly stemmed from concern for our health. Nobody knows how many hundreds of thousands of Americans have needlessly become ill and how many have died in the name of "consumer safety." It's enough to make you sick. -- 30 -- Michael Fumento is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. and author most recently of The Fat of the Land: The Obesity Epidemic and What Overweight Americans Can Do to Help Themselves (Viking). Note - asians also have high rates of stomach cancer, due to salted, pickled, and dried foods.