Irradiation for Cleaner Fruits and Veggies
The crafty critters that plague our food supply and make us sick can’t always be washed away with conventional means. Scientific studies have found that the microbes that can cause bouts of vomiting and diarrhea can burrow inside the leaves of lettuce and other leafy green vegetables and hide in the tiniest cracks and crevices of still other fruits and veggies. Sometimes they even band together in tight-knit colonies to form biofilms that protect the bacteria by coating the fruit or vegetable with a bacteria-protection barrier.
Conventional washing and even chlorine-based disinfectants can’t always remove all these cunning microbes, which include E. coli and Salmonella, two of the bacteria that frequently cause outbreaks of foodborne illnesses, but scientists in Pennsylvania have discovered that these hardy organisms are no match for irradiation, according to Brendan A. Niemira and his colleagues.
Irradiation and the use of it in our public food supply is currently under investigation by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The process involves exposing foods to electron beams in order to kill parasites and other pathogens associated with food by disrupting the genetic material of all living cells exposed to the electron beams. The beams can reach inside the food, destroying everything conventional washing cannot reach.
Source: American Chemical Society
Argh! We have been able to irradiate foods for years (I remember studies and reports of the controversy in 1988 when I studied it in college!), and its always just “under investigation” I think we have got to get over the irrational fear of this technology and allow its implementation. It should be a standard part of the process for all foods in the public food supply. My only concern is that the standards of cleanliness and inspection continue as today, and the irradiation become an additional step. We don’t want producers to suddenly get very sloppy, relying on irradiation to catch everything. We just need to maintain the current standards and add this additional important step in the process.