Posted on 04/14/2008 5:20:18 PM PDT by blam
So if you want healthy fruit, you need to have a nuclear power plan built near your town.
(I should really change my tagline before posting this endorsement of zombie movies.)
Oh no not this again. Irradiation was discussed in the 80’s and the scared of nuclear-xrays-cancer causing-crowd had a huge fit. History is such a comfort as you now know what to expect this go around, absolute hysteria and zero.
Irradiate Iran, do it for the children.
It’s amazing to me the Human race has survived for thousands of years eating these poisonous fruits and vegetables...my goodness, how did we ever get along without irradiation studies and such......./sarc
Wonder why this kind of science is believed by so many people who in turn, won’t believe the scientists about global warming being a natural event that goes from cooling to warming & back again & has been going on for centuries on this earth.
Wasn't Chernobyl and Three Mile Island enough for you horrible, evil people? Now you want to nuke our food?
/insane antinuke protester mode off.
I ate mangoes in 1991, which almost killed me. I thought that irradiation of fruit and meats was a sure thing. The problem is that there is no window of time or hubs of distribution which can do the job within the "just in time" systems of distribution we now rely on. The nation's food supply is about a week on perishables. That's it. Taking three days to route produce/meats to irradiation centers is just not possible.
During the anthrax scares Surebeam sold hundreds of irradiation units to the post office. Unfortunately they had a hard time getting them set up just right and ignited more mail into flames than anything else.
The USDA in Wyndmoor Pa. has had a fully functional irradiation chamber for foods since the 1980’s. That’s in suburban Philadelphia. Of course the residents who live all around the complex have no idea whatsoever. Until now that is.
Had = Has. Present tense.
So can we sue these turkeys if we get food poisoning?
I think the movie sold a lot of other people on soft drinks and candy bars.
In the 80’s husband ran a company in San Marcos, CA which used irradiation on wire. When the idea of irradiated food came out there was much hope that irradiation would help problems with meat and possibly fruit and veggies. Yes, locating irradiation machines close to food source could have been worked out especially at slaughterhouses.
Ten year’s since that discussion certainly could have found many advancements in the problems of location and machinery. Irradiation equipment has shriveled to nothing and it is a shame as some lives could have been saved.
As for the meats, a protest was cried @ 3 cents a pound. Many grocers signed on for ground beef at those prices, but the installations never took place due to inability to raise capital and some very questionable accounting practices on the part of Surebeam and Titan.
The above cartoon is from Mike Adams site NaturalNews.com.
The problem, as Mike sees it, and I think he's right, is not that irradiation makes the food more harmful by making it more radioactive or some such. The fear of radioactivity is just a paper tiger conveniently brought up just to justify ridicule of those who would oppose irradiation.
Rather, the problem is that irradiation destroys essential nutrients in the food, leaving us weaker and more susceptible to disease.
See Mike's article The Food Irradiation Plot: Why the USDA Wants to Sterilize Fresh Produce and Turn Live Foods into Dead Foods.
To quote briefly from this article:
Even a simple leaf of spinach contains hundreds of natural medicines -- phytonutrients that help prevent cancer, eye diseases, nervous system disorders, heart disease and much more. Every living vegetable is a powerhouse of disease-fighting medicine: Broccoli prevents cancer, beet greens cleanse the liver, cilantro removes heavy metals, celery prevents cancer, berries prevent heart disease and dark leafy greens help prevent over a dozen serious health conditions while boosting immune function and helping prevent other infections. But when you subject these fruits and vegetables to enough radiation to kill 99.9% of the pathogens that may be hitching a ride, you also destroy many of the phytonutrients responsible for these tremendous health benefits!
This means that while irradiating food may decrease outbreaks of food-borne illnesses, it will have the unintended consequence of increasing the number of people who get sick from other infections (and chronic diseases) due to the fact that their source of natural medicine has been destroyed. For many Americans, you see, salad greens are their one remaining source for phytonutrients. Given their diets of processed foods, junk foods and cooked foods, there are very few opportunities for these consumers to get fresh, phytonutrient-rich foods into their diet. And now the USDA wants to take that away, too, by mandating the irradiation of all fresh produce.
In the 80’s there were only two companies that manufactured irradiation equipment High Voltage Engineering and RDI. No longer in business. If the crying crowd had not been so vocal both of those companies would still be in business because they were innovators.
I worked a temp job in a research facility at Texas A&M that did this kind of irradiation on frozen hamburger patties (good idea if you like your burgers rare). The kind of irradiation they are talking about in the article is irradiating foods with what is essentially a giant electron gun (like the one in the back of a tube TV only it fills up a large part of a building), they don’t expose these foods to x-rays, gamma rays, or anything the would leave residual radioactivity in the food. You can think of it more like electrocuting the bacteria (not quite accurate, but close enough for this discussion) than killing them with x-rays.
OK Thanks. But if the word is irradiation it will bring out the howlers!! Once again ending what could save lives.
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