Health & Fitness: Food Fight Over Gamma Rays

To Michael Fey, it is the "most important advance in dietary health since the invention of pasteurization." To Denis Mosgofian, it is the "massacre of the American food supply." Fey, a food scientist, works for a company called Radiation Technology. Mosgofian is director of the National Coalition to Stop Food Irradiation. The two men are talking -- yelling, really -- about one of the most emotional health issues of the 1980s: the use of irradiation as a preservative. The mixing of gamma rays with edibles has set off a nuclear food-chain reaction, releasing high rhetoric, short tempers and mass uncertainty.

The Food and Drug Administration approved the process for harvested wheat and potatoes more than 20 years ago; dried spices and slaughtered pork were added to the list in the 1980s. Last April the agency gave the go-ahead for irradiating fruits and vegetables, and a furor erupted. Despite the FDA's consent, the process until now has been used mainly to preserve herbs and spices. But last week gamma ray-treated fruit made its first U.S. appearance when Laurenzo's Farmer's Market in North Miami Beach began offering irradiated Puerto Rican mangoes. The FDA is now considering whether to extend approval to fish and poultry. Nineteen other countries have also endorsed irradiation for a wide array of foodstuffs.

The method, which like radiology was developed around the turn of the century, is simple: food passes through a lead-shielded concrete chamber where radioactive cobalt 60 or cesium 137 bombards it with gamma rays, killing insects and bacteria and sometimes slowing ripening. The food does not become radioactive. "There's nothing in common at all between a nuclear reactor like Chernobyl and an irradiator," says Karl Abraham, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). "It's like comparing bananas to tigers." Treated food "can be immediately eaten," says George Giddings, director of food irradiation at Isomedix.

Supporters claim that gamma-ray exposure offers an alternative to controversial pesticides, fumigants and preservatives, and protects human health by killing parasites like trichina worms in pork and bacteria like salmonella, which causes food poisoning. Irradiation, they note, can extend shelf life. "We see the day when you can go into a supermarket and buy a barbecued chicken that has been cooked, vacuum-packed and irradiated. It can sit on the shelf for eight years, and all you'll have to do is heat it up," predicts Physicist Martin Welt, founder of Radiation Technology.