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.
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
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.
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.