Should We Irradiate Away Harmful Bacteria in Our Food?

When a food safety outbreak occurs, like the one that is unraveling currently in Europe, the topic of food irradiation makes headlines. According to the AP, food safety experts like Michael Osterholm think consumers should give irradiation a chance:

“‘We need to do whatever we can to give us a wider margin of safety,’ says Dr. Michael Osterholm, a University of Minnesota infectious disease specialist who frequently advises the government. ‘Food irradiation for a number of produce items would give us not just a marginal increase, but give us probably the Grand Canyon increase of safety.’”

One thing irradiation doesn’t do that would also help make us safe? It doesn’t help us identify where things go wrong in the first place. Larger volumes and longer global supply chains make trace-back more difficult and put a larger number of consumers at risk if there is an incident of microbial contamination somewhere in the system. The E. coli outbreak in Europe shows just how hard it can be to pinpoint where things go wrong in such a labyrinthine system. Food technologies like irradiation are no substitute for good information on how and where food production problems go wrong.

Irradiation also raises serious questions for consumers. The byproducts found in irradiated foods have been linked to genetic damage and serious health problems like cancer and birth defects in both lab animals and in humans who have eaten them.

Irradiation isn’t a panacea. Real solutions lie in adequate funding of our food safety bodies, including more stringent monitoring of imports, and restoring local, regional food systems that make it easier to identify where food production and distribution problems occur. It is also critical that we address the decades of bad policy that have helped consolidate the food system, making any single problem more widespread and difficult to pinpoint once it enters a global supply chain.