Archive Gallery: The Future of Food

Exposing the food to radiation does not make it radioactive - it only kills bacteria and fungi. The chemicals we instead used to preserve it, such as nitrates, nitrites and high levels of salt in canning, and the increased problems with E. coli contamination, are turning out to be much more harmful.

The only reason the food industry can't preserve fresh produce and other food by sterilizing it with radiation is public perception and an article like this in Popular science about "atomic radiation" isn't helping any. Was this researched before this statement was made?

(There is a discussion of this over at the original food radiation article, and one of the commenters questioned the knowledge of two of the other commenters. My PhD is in plant biology, not nuclear chemistry, and since I'm just commenting and not writing an article, I didn't spend spend hours finding references. But this was true when I took an undergraduate course in Nuclear Chemistry and still true when I worked as a textbook editor. I know enough to want to put in the disclaimer for a fully informed audience that some elements can be made into radioactive isotopes by exposing them to the *right* type of radiation. However, the exposure of any one type of food to a specific type of radiation likely wouldn't make it as radioactive as the average banana, which contains potassium that has a natural occurring radioactive isotope. In any case, checking the radioactivity of the treated food only requires only a simple reading with a Geiger counter.)

Even though there is a discussion about this over at the original food radiation article, I wanted to address it here as well.