Are Anti-Irradiation Groups Making Our Food Less Safe?

March 6, 2009— -- Many food producers want to expose your food to radiation -- zapping it with high levels of ionized rays. Why? Because doing so can protect you from food poisoning.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that, on average, more than 1 million Americans are poisoned every week by something they ate, and food poisoning kills about 5,000 people each year.

Rainer Mueller knows the real dangers of food poisoning because years ago, it happened to his son.

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"He ate a hamburger, got sick, and within 10 days was dead. Thirteen years old, never a chance to do anything," he said. "He was captain of the soccer team, a quality straight-A student. He was a great kid."

A grieving Mueller joined a group called Safe Tables Our Priority (STOP), which lobbies to mandate cleaner food, but then he discovered that totally clean food is often a myth.

"It's impossible to get food completely clean, especially if the bacteria are inside the food," he said. "You can scrub the outside all you want, and you'll get it clean, but you won't get it safe."

There is one proven way to make food safer: irradiate it.

Irradiation is the process of moving food through a stream of ionized energy. It's a little like an X-ray machine, except the point is to kill bacteria.

Studies show that irradiation works. Irradiated meat stays fresh twice as long, and irradiated strawberries can last up to three weeks on the shelf.

Astronauts have been eating irradiated food for years, because NASA doesn't want to worry about them getting food poisoning.

Omaha Steaks, a gourmet mail-order meat company, irradiates all its hamburger meat and is confident in the safety of its irradiated products. In fact, ground meat that's not irradiated should come with a danger warning label, says the company's president Bruce Simon, because no matter how carefully anyone disinfects a production plant, they can never kill all the harmful bacteria.

"Our plants are cleaner than any emergency room I've ever been in," said Simon. "But it only takes four cells to make a person sick. At least with irradiation I know I can kill those cells."