Green light for radiation-preserved foods

Press, 16 May 1985, Page 13

Green light for radiation-preserved foods

From

SYLVIA COLLIER

L in London

Frank Ley is a pleasant, successful businessman with many thousands of dollars worth of radioactive cobalt-60 tucked away behind 1.8-metre thick concrete walls in Swindon, in the south of England.

By the end of the year he hopes his cobalt’s gamma rays will be at work on food for sale in supermarkets in Britain. The British Government’s Advisory Committee on Irradiated and Novel Foods is expected to report soon, and it is expected to recommend that using radiation to perserve food is safe and should be permitted. Bombarding food with gamma rays will not lodge particles of low-level radiation ij.iood. A oneijlme zap will destroy bacteria by

changing their chemical composition.

Its advocates claim it does not change the taste of most foods unless the irradiation is excessive — though they also acknowledge that fatty fish, dairy products, and some fruit will taste disgusting. The chairman of the British committee is Sir Arnold Burgen, a medical scientist, Master of Darwin College, vice-president of The Royal Society, and part-time director of Amersham International, which makes radioactive isotopes. He is one of the convinced.

“We have no evidence to suggest that irradiation of food is harmful,” he says. “I can’t see that we are going to hav£ any problems.”

The retail food industry wants irradiation because it will’prolong shelf life and because it believes that reducing the bacterial load of food such as poultry could cut down on the risk of salmonella infection. Frank Ley, who left the British Atomic Energy Research Establishment in 1969 to start his business, already irradiates special diets for germ-susceptible patients; special Department of Health regulations permit those. Radiation can indeed delay the ripening of fruit and kill off mould, but it will not prevent reinfestation from, for example,, not defrosting a chicken properly-#? storing wheat

in decrepit silos. Since acceptable levels of radiation will not kill the spores whcih cause botulism-type poisons, the worry is that the customer will no longer detect an “off’ odour as a warning. World wide, consumer groups are trying to sort out where they stand on irradiation. In the United States, Kathleen Tucker, director of the Health and Energy Institute in Washington, cites tests which showed that animals and insects fed irradiated foods developed abnormalities. The United States Food and Drug Administration has received thousands of svorried letters.

Within Europe, the German socialists have tabled a resolution at the E.E.C., to be debated later this month, calling for a Europewide ban until more is known about long-term effects. The French consumer group, 8.E.U.C., is worried that “because of a supposed negative reaction of consumers. there is a danger that food irradiation may be introduced on a wide scale without proper public scrutiny.” In Britain, the Consumers’ Association wants irradiated food labelled, so that buyers can at least make a choice. If the British Government decides to give the go-ahead, it is likely that contractors would carry out most irradiation, using coba’g--60, mainly from nuclear reactors

Canada, until big food firms spend an estimated $1.2 million per plant to open their own. The Nuclear Installations Inspectorate would license food irradiation factories, and the National Radiological Protection Board would monitor conditions.

Dr Alan Holmes, of the Food Research Association, whose 680 members in Britain include the big food companies, envisages that by the end of the century “we will maybe have food that is chilled, gas-packed, irradiated, chill-distri-buted, with a six-month shelf life, that can be put into a microwave oven and be ready to eat in a few minutes.” Copyright — London Observer Service.