So, if Food & Water Watch’s reports haven’t already broken your gross-o-meter, give these next few paragraphs a read and check it again.

As you may know from yesterday’s blog, FDA is considering relaxing rules on irradiation, lifting labeling requirements or substituting the word “pasteurized.” The reason why they want to do this, though, is where the gag factor comes in. It’s so you can eat poo.

In the factory-farm meat production model, faster is always better. High production is the whole goal, so little things like sanitation and animal welfare can sometimes fall by the wayside. Remember that disturbing video the Humane Society put out a few months ago, leading to the massive Hallmark-Westland beef recall?  When a “downer” cow is pushed and dragged across the manure-covered floor of a facility before going to slaughter, and is possibly cut and injured, the resulting meat is contaminated with fecal matter, vomit, pus… you get the picture. The health result of this, also, is pretty much as gross as you’d imagine.

It would seem clear that the solution should begin right there in the plant, with improving conditions. But there’s another option—one that some industry players favor because it doesn’t threaten the crank-'em-out factory-farm model. Food irradiation kills most bacteria—so you don’t have to make sure the meat is clean. Just sterilize that poo!  Then we can just eat it. Yum!

In addition to likely being dirty, irradiated meat contains some chemicals that materialize during the irradiation process. The scariest substances, known as 2-ACBs (short for 2-alkylcyclobutanones, if you were wondering), have been linked to colon cancer, and have never been found anywhere in the world outside of irradiated meat. They’re formed when fat is exposed to radiation, and have been definitively identified in irradiated beef, chicken, pork, lamb, eggs, peanuts, salmon, mangoes, papayas, and more. FDA has never studied the potential health hazards of 2-ACBs, and scientists don’t know how the body metabolizes them. And that’s just one substance. Just, you might say, a taste of irradiation’s goodness…

Every story needs a moral, and this time it’s more like one of those old-school warning-style fairy tales. Basically, irradiating dirty meat doesn’t make it clean, and can even add bonus nasties that you’ve never even heard of.  But we hate to leave you simply with, “and then the wolf gobbled her up.”  There is, as always, our power as consumers. Since we currently have labeling for irradiated foods, we can make informed choices about the food we choose to purchase. And—for now—we can use our eyesight!  More on this next time…

-Erica Schuetz
email • bio