I Want to Find Irradiated Salad Greens in My Local Grocery Store
Call me a Popeye, but I like having fresh green salads for lunch or dinner. Unfortunately, it is sometimes risky to eat raw vegetables because of the risk of contamination by common bacteria like E. coli, salmonella and listeria. I have long wondered when it would be possible to purchase greens that had been irradiated to kill the bacteria without changing the texture, flavor or nutritional value.
My wait is now closer to ending. On August 21, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the use of ionizing radiation at doses that will drastically reduce the population of the target bacteria on spinach and iceberg lettuce without harming the food.
The type of radiation that will be used – high energy gamma rays – cannot cause food to be come radioactive. A second characteristic of high energy gamma is that it can be administered with great precision by controlling the exposure times, distances and angles.
Gamma irradiation food processing plants can also be quite energy efficient. Though some processors use electrically powered devices to create gamma rays, there are others that use selected radioactive isotopes like Cobalt-60 or Cesium-137.
Because of the risk of recontamination during handling and transportation, I suspect that irradiated foods will be sold in sealed bags. The technique of irradiating materials in sealed bags has been in use for decades with medical equipment.
Since people have a right to know about the processing – either because they are like me and want the product or because they might have some reason to avoid the product – irradiated products will be marked with a special label called a radura.
At least some of the many people with suppressed immune systems are quite happy with the news and are anxiously awaiting approval from the FDA for irradiation treatment of additional fruits and vegetables. For them, techniques that improve food safety are matters of life and death, not just a matter of preventing temporary discomfort.
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August 28th, 2008 at 7:13 am
Why not get to the real problem of the crap on the surface of the produce and then get it clean? Here is link to an interesting research study: (you have to wonder why the foodservice operators and proccessing plant have not switched to this type of item)
http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2008/06/26/Produce_wash_kills_bacteria_on_food/UPI-42751214505272/
Produce wash kills bacteria on food
Published: June 26, 2008 at 2:34 PM
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PULLMAN, Wash., June 26 (UPI) — A fruit and vegetable wash, when used in food-manufacturing, can decrease food pathogens in produce-processing wash water, U.S. researchers said.
Researchers at the University of Idaho and Washington State University said the product sold commercially as FIT Fruit and Vegetable Wash, not only proved much more effective than the commonly used chlorine dioxide, but is made from ingredients like citric acid and distilled grapefruit oil that are generally regarded as safe.
Chlorine dioxide, used in food plants, can put workers at risk, when compromised by soils and plant debris in the wash water. In the study, chlorine dioxide killed 90 percent of the target organisms in the food plant and follow-up laboratory studies. By contrast, FIT killed 99.999 percent, said food scientist Dong-Hyun Kang of Washington State University.
“If you had a million bacteria, you would have one left,” Kang said.
The research — unusual because part of it was conducted under real-world conditions in an Idaho fresh pack potato operation — is published online ahead of print in the Journal of Food Science in August.
August 28th, 2008 at 10:28 am
Good to see a rational perspective on this topic. As a long time health food supporter and reader, theres a few FUDish myths that bother me. One is the mistaken impression that irradiated produce is radioactive.
The second is that GMOs are inherently bad. While I believe caution needs to be taken, the modifications typically made to plants and microbes (for example putting extra protein genes in rice) seem unlikely to bear any potential to cause harm by any great stretch of the imagination. This kind of unrational fear of GMOs even is preventing vegetarian rennet from advancing, as vegetarian rennets, such as GRAS come from microbes with slight genetic modifications. In this case one gene is added to produce a lactose digesting enzyme, yet the method has been derided for being a GMO. Such blanket criticisms are ridiculous.
With these kind of fake issues out of the way, we can hopefully tackle real problems, like the harmful effects of pesticides and herbicides on the human body.
-Jason @ DailyTech LLC