Food Irradiation

Food irradiation would save more lives than the proposed Food Safety and Modernization Act, S.510, and food irradiation will not make government bigger, it will not increase the deficit, and it will not drive small farmers out of business while large corporate farm companies cope with the increased government regulation.

The irradiation of food has been proven to be a safe and effective method to destroy microorganisms, bacteria, viruses, or insects that might be present in the food supply. Food irradiation is the process of exposing food to ionizing radiation, and it can be used to kill many food borne diseases while extending the shelf-life of many foods.

Irradiated food does not become radioactive and the food does not come into direct contact with a radioactive material. But in some cases there may be subtle chemical changes, ref. wikipedia. Food irradiation has been proposed as a means of making food safer to eat since the 1950s, however detractors of food irradiation have been effective in stalling it's widespread use by citing these subtle changes as posing undue health risks to the general public. These are the same people who manipulate so-called scientific data to support other alarmist claims like global warming. There has never been any correlation of their claims to any health effects.

Other food protection methods such as cooking, canning, and pasteurization also alter food chemistry subtly, but have been used routinely in modern times. If, for example, milk was irradiated it would retain many of the nutrients that are destroyed by pasteurization yet the milk's shelf-life would be extended significantly.

Several methods of food irradiation are available. They include irradiation using a gamma ray source such as Cobalt-60 (the radioactive source is sealed into a container that keeps it from contacting food), and X-ray devices (no radioactive material involved) similar to but more powerful than those used in diagnostic X-ray procedures.