Food Irradiation and the Lies of Industrial Food

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www.wildmatters.org
2001 Issue

A critical look at the new push for food irradiation and a call to address the industrieal factors that are making it all possible.

Since Hudson Foods' August announcement that it was recalling 25 million pounds of hamburger meat due to E.coli contamination, the U.S. media has gone out of its way to promote food irradiation as a "solution" to this growing problem.

The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, National Public Radio and all of the television network news programs have run primarily pro-food irradiation pieces that all seem to go like this: the food supply is contaminated; there is a "quick and easy" technology called food irradiation that will magically solve the problem; anyone with extra initials after their name endorses its safety; and the only things holding back its widespread use is a public that fails to understand science and technology and a tenacious group "calling itself Food & Water." In other words, the coverage has been propagandistic and shallow, reducing a complex nuclear issue down to dueling sound-bytes: "it's going to kill you" or "it's going to save you."

The corporate media's coverage of food irradiation has consistently failed to even address the larger issues regarding the technology, such as how the food supply has become so contaminated, the ramifications of building hundreds of nuclear irradiation facilities across the nation, or food irradiation's role in further centralizing and monopolizing the food supply. Perhaps even worse, almost all of the coverage reeks of blind scientific patriotism in which the public is expected to accept anything that's high-tech. To question the latest scientific gimmicks and gadgetry brings an onslaught of derisive name- calling, which is just the opposite of what should be expected in public debates regarding food irradiation— a technology that will not only dramatically change the chemical composition of food, but the very manner in which we produce, process and distribute it.

The biggest challenge in the face of such media stonewalling is to avoid succumbing to the shallowness. Yes, we must continue to address irradiated food's carcinogenic properties, the nutritional loss, and the environmental hazards. But we cannot allow ourselves to be trapped on this level. While it certainly makes for easy-to-write articles, it fails to connect with the larger cultural ills the technologies are both born from and give rise to. Worse, it handcuffs activism to a tiresome series of "he said, she said" scenarios that never get around to taking on the cultural conditions that make the introduction of such technologies possible in the first place.

Irradiation's False Promises
First, it must be understood this call for food irradiation indicates we have a serious problem with food safety in this country, particularly in regards to our meat and poultry supply. But food irradiation is not the cure its advocates want us to believe it is. Rather, it will allow the causes of meat contamination to flourish, while giving the false appearance the problem is being solved. Instead of being forced to clean up inhumane, filthy and sloppy processing facilities, corporations can continue the practices that lead to contamination, and simply irradiate the fecal contaminated meat products that should have been discarded in the first place.

But purveyors of high technology gimmicks like food irradiation never like to look to prevention since it gets in the way of business. Instead, they focus on the symptoms, and do a fine job getting our complacent media and easy-to-buy legislators to do the same.

With each reported E.coli or salmonella outbreak, the public is worked into a shallow frenzy about how many illnesses or deaths resulted, and what you can do to protect yourself. Then the meat corporations and government officials try to lull us to sleep by rolling out the "we've got the safest food supply in the world" sound-byte.

But how did we get to a place where so much of our food is contaminated? The simple answer from our perspective is industrial food and industrial consumers.

We've heard it all before, but here it goes again: We're a nation fixated on a destructively false sense of "simplicity" driven by, and primarily benefiting, corporations. With the food supply, this false simplicity revolves around severing the public's connection with the sources of their food and equating any direct relationship with food, from producing it to cooking it, with drudgery. This "get off the farm" and/or "out of the kitchen" mentality is the backbone of industrial food, the driving force behind skyrocketing consumption of processed foods, and the primary cultural reason for the dramatic increase of contaminated foods.

But instead of realizing that our lives have actually become more harried, complicated and dangerous, we're repeatedly fooled into accepting one slick explanation after another about how the next great high-tech gadget will really make things easy for us. And with E.coli in red meat, salmonella in chicken, and contaminated raspberries from faraway countries, that "easy" solution is food irradiation.

With the wave of the nuclear wand, exposing the food supply to radiation the equivalent of tens of millions of chest X-rays, we'll no longer have to worry about the safety of fast food hamburgers or out-of-season raspberries from other continents that viciously exploit workers, and our food supply and our lives will finally be safe, simple and carefree. Or at least that's what they want us to believe, as they hope issues like animal welfare, environmental destruction, farmer and farm worker rights, rural and community preservation, fossil fuel addiction, nuclear proliferation, and sustainability remain conveniently ignored.

In a rational, people-centered democracy, one would expect a full discussion of all the issues surrounding a technology like food irradiation. But once again, we must pinch ourselves and wake up to the fact that our demo-cratic and cultural institutions have been largely hijacked by corporate influences.

Thanks to a corporate-sponsored media, we never learn about the central role corporate consolidation and monopolization of the meat industry has played in causing the contamination. Rather, we're fed the corporate line that food irradiation will make everything "all better," while the causes remain conveniently under wraps. And it will continue until enough of us figure out the charade and begin to move for some real cultural change, moving beyond the tail-chasing scenarios we keep getting ourselves into by tackling specific issues with single-minded campaigns.

Esther Maynard
Assistant Editor
www.wildmatters.org