Food-irradiation ban lifted for fruit fly

Press, 28 January 1982, Page 5

Food-irradiation ban lifted for fruit fly

NZPA staff correspondent Washington The United States is relaxing a long-time ban on irradiating food to counter the threat of Mediterranean fruit flies. The move may well lead to a multi-million-dollar business in preserving food by bombarding it with gamma rays. The flies caused havoc in California last year, threatening the state's SUSIS,OOO million agricultural industry and facing New Zealand with the danger of importing the flies’ eggs or larvae in Californian fruit. The flies are dormant now.

Agricultural officials have said that they are “quietly optimistic" that the flies will be destroyed next year but they confess that they are not sure how strongly the insects will re-emerge next spring. It has been legal in the United States since the 1960 s to irradiate potatoes and wheat flour but no company has done so. Part of the problem is a public fear of anything to do with radiation.

The Apollo astronauts ate irradiated corned beef, ham, and steak in space. That was legal because they were outside the United States. The United States Army

ran a food-irradiation programme for 25 years. It was taken over in 1980 by the United States Department of Agriculture. In the Army programme, according to the Atomic Industrial Forum, food was kept from spoiling for weeks without refrigeration and crops prone to sprout, such as onions and potatoes, stayed fresh for months.

An American irradiator who began by sterilising medical products with gamma-ray bombardment branched out into irradiating food, including fresh fish fillets and strawberries, but all the produce had to be exported.

The irradiation can be produced by cobalt-60, which is used to sterilise bandages and medical equipment, or cesium-137, which is a byproduct of nuclear fission. The food, which is often sealed to prevent later recontamination, is exposed to the radiation in chambers with 2m-thick concrete walls. Radioactive tubes are raised from a pool of water and the food absorbs a set dosage which pasteurises and sterilises it, killing all insects, larvae, and eggs.

A number of other countries already irradiate food, mostly as pilot projects.

The Atomic Industrial Forum, which says that the treatment poses no health threats whatsoever, points to the enormous benefits the process would have in keeping food palatable in hot climates, where refrigeration is uncommon. It says that even in the United States about 30 per cent of fresh produce is lost through spoilage. The United States Food and Drugs Administration has given permission to a Californian firm, if the firm passes Federal requirerrtents, to set up a SUSIO million plant to irradiate food on a commercial scale. The firm will be exempted from the general ban on irradiation because the F.D.A. has classified the fruit-fly threat as an emergency.

A spokesman for the University of California, which is experimenting with gamma-ray processes, said that “there is going to be a multi-million-dollar industry springing up very quickly with F.D.A. approval." Mr Neil Nielson, the president of Emergent Technologies, the firm which will carry out the irradiation, said that a plant capable of handling thousands of tonnes of produce each day could be set up within a year.