On the Edge—School Lunch Scandal

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On the Edge—School Lunch Scandal

JoAnn Guest

Oct 22, 2006 19:23 PDT

 

 

 

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By Burton Goldberg

 

Last May, with little fanfare, Congress passed a bill that may be

harmful to our children's health. A provision tacked onto the farm

bill by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) directs the U.S. Department of

Agriculture to buy irradiated beef for the federal school lunch

program. Although your local newspaper most likely didn't report it

and your congressional representatives may not even know about it,

this provision, in effect, makes America's children guinea pigs for

a food processing method that has never been shown to be safe.

 

The push by the government and meatpacking companies for food

irradiation is really just a way of masking the need for adequate

food safety testing. Successive outbreaks of diseased meat have

captured headlines for years: the Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak

in 1993; the

attempted shutdown in 1999 of Supreme Beef Processors, one of the

leading suppliers of ground beef to the national school lunch

program, for salmonella contamination in its plant; and last

summer's ConAgra recall of 19 million pounds of beef contaminated

with E. coli.

 

These organisms do not get into beef by some mysterious, invisible

process. The germs are present in the intestines of cows, and they

spread when manure or stomach contents get splattered on the meat.

 

Irradiation does not remove this fecal matter. Nor does it kill all

E. coli or salmonella germs. Some germs survive and continue to

divide during storage until they eventually spoil the food, or

multiply in the human gastrointestinal tract until they cause

illness.

 

Such delays make it harder to track down the original source of the

contamination. As the surviving bacteria multiply, radiation-

resistant strains of bacteria are created.

 

Nor does radiation destroy two of the most lethal food

contaminants—botulism spores and the prions that cause mad cow

disease.

" Irradiation is not a substitute for testing, " Caroline Smith

DeWaal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the

Public Interest recently told the New York Times. All it can do is

effectively prolong shelf life, she says.

 

What's more, although food that has been irradiated is not

radioactive, it is changed in fundamental ways that affect health.

 

One of the best reviews I've seen on the topic is the book The Food

That Would Last Forever: Understanding the Dangers of Food

Irradiation, by Gary Gibbs, an osteopath and psychiatrist at the

Waccamaw Center for Mental Health in Georgetown, South Carolina. He

reviews the large body of research on food irradiation and clearly

describes the effects of this hard-to-understand technique.

 

Food is irradiated in one of two ways—either with gamma rays

produced by radioactive substances like cobalt-60 and cesium-137, or

with an electron beam that approaches the speed of light.

 

Regardless of the method, the effect is the same: Ionizing

radiation breaks molecular bonds by knocking electrons out of their

orbit around the nuclei of

cells. The process destroys the DNA of bacteria like E. coli, which

cause disease in humans, but it also destroys the chemical makeup of

the food itself.

 

Ionizing radiation, according to Gibbs, alters the atom's electrical

charge, and these newly charged particles are called ions or free

radicals—the well-known culprits in various kinds of disease,

including cancer.

 

These free radicals ricochet and bounce around, turning other

atoms into ions as well. They seek out other ions with which to bond

and in the process create new chemicals.

 

These include formaldehyde and benzene, which are known to cause

mutations, and other chemical substances called unique radiolytic

products (URPs).

 

Irradiation not only produces new chemicals in food, it changes the

food's nutritional value. In a paper published in Nutrition, George

Tritsch, a biochem- ist affiliated with the Roswell Park Cancer

Institute in Buffalo, New York, explains the extent of chemical

changes that occur during irradiation.

 

At a dose of 100,000 rads (the minimum dose approved by the FDA), 6

to 10 million chemical bonds are broken.

This means, says Tritsch, that in " half a cup of water, which

constitutes about 80 percent of most foods, one billion bonds will

be broken.

 

This introduces a vast number of new molecules in what was

previously a natural food. " Consider what happens when pure sucrose

in a water solution is irradiated, he adds; some of the sucrose

remains, but so does a newly created chemical called sodium formate,

which is related to formaldehyde and has been known to produce

chromosomal aberrations in humans.

 

The dangers of irradiation are being tracked overseas as well.

Germany's Federal Research Center has made alarming discoveries

about the unique chemicals (URPs) formed in food treated by

irradiation.

 

Among them are cyclobutanones, which do not occur naturally in any

food and have been

shown to promote cancer development and cause genetic and cellular

damage to human and rat cells. On the basis of these findings, the

European Union has forbidden irradiation of foods until ongoing

experiments into the toxicity of these chemicals are completed.

 

By comparison, after several FDA staffers attended an international

conference in 2000 at which these findings were discussed, the

agency promptly legalized irradiation for eggs—in which

cyclobutanones were

first discovered eight years earlier.

 

Why? It's anyone's guess. Unlike the German government, the U.S.

government has performed no irradiation safety tests.

 

Although 411 studies were regarded as relevant to the

question of irradiation, the FDA threw out all but five of them, and

used those as the basis for its decision.

 

Meanwhile, irradiation could wreak havoc on our population. In his

Nutrition article, George Tritsch argues that the cancer-causing

properties of irradiated food may not be known for decades. " By the

time food irradiation is outlawed, " he says, " generations of

potential cancer

victims may be in the pipeline. "

 

We can take steps to block this potential catastrophe. Last

November, the Berkeley (Calif.) school board, a pioneer in providing

fresh, nutritious food to schoolchildren, became the first in the

country to refuse to buy or serve irradiated meat.

 

You can do the same. Demand that your school board or school food

service director follow suit. Tell

everyone what Carol Tucker Foreman, director of the Food Policy

Institute at the Consumer Federation of America, told the New York

Times: " There is no place in the world where a large population has

eaten large amounts of irradiated food over a long period of time.

 

It makes me queasy that we are going to feed it to children. "

 

Boycott Irradiated Meat

Consumers have already successfully boycotted irradiated foods and

the retailers marketing them. Irradiated whole foods are required to

display the " radura, " a flowerlike symbol in a broken ring,

and " Treated by

Irradiation " or " Treated with Radiation " must be included in the

labeling.

 

But be aware there is no such requirement when the treated

food is only one ingredient, as in the tomatoes in canned tomato

soup or the meat in frozen dinners.

 

Meanwhile, it's worth noting that the following retailers,

distributors,

and restaurants are marketing irradiated ground beef and other meats:

 

Hy-Vee Supermarkets, Price Chopper, Wegman's Food Markets, Publix,

D'Agostino Supermarkets, Lowes Foods, Pathmark Supermarkets, Kroger,

Cub

Food, Farm Fresh, Omaha Steaks, Schwan's, and Schucks; major

distributors like Huisken Meat Company, W.W. Johnson, and Sysco;

Dairy

Queen; and the giant agribusiness concern Excel. You can find the

complete list on Public Citizen's website (www.citizen.org). Source:

Minnesota Beef Council; Public Citizen, a Washington, D.C., consumer

group

 

 

JoAnn Guest

mrsjo-

www.geocities.com/mrsjoguest/Diets