Irradiation headache for British Govt

Press, 5 March 1987, Page 34

Irradiation headache for British Govt

By HELENA WISNIEWSKI NZPA staff correspondent London A public debate on the pros and cons of food irradiation in Britain has intensified over the last year — complicating a decision the Government must make on its legality. A ban on the sale of food that has been irradiated — a highly effective process of extending its shelf-life — has been in place in Britain since 1967. Now the issue is whether the ban should be lifted, especially since a Government-appointed committee recommended last April that irradiation be allowed. “Irradiation can be used to extend the shelflife of certain fruit and vegetables and ... to kill or reduce the number of pathogenic and spoilage organisms in a variety of other products,” the Advisory Committee on Irradiated and Novel Food concluded last year. The benefits of the process offered strong grounds for granting general clearance on its use, it said. The committee’s recommendations echoed similar assertions already made by the World Health

Organisation, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation.

Irradiated foods are now available from 30 countries: prawns and frogs’ legs in The Netherlands, sausage and fish paste in Japan, spices in the United States, onions in Thailand, and green mango pickle in South Africa, for example.

But the British Government, under increasing pressure from the food industry to introduce the process, has also been warned by scientists not to rush a decision. It has been bombarded with controversial evidence on the issue as well as political attacks. “We believe that there is a very worrying and serious public issue over the decision of lifting the ban on irradiated food which the Government may have in mind,” Labour’s chief health spokesman, Michael Meacher, warned a press conference in November.

But the expected decision — which he believed the Government would “slip in” over Christmas — did not eventuate. Edwina Currie, junior Health Minister, told the House of Commons Health and Agriculture Ministers

were still considering advice they had received.

Research on food irradiation has been going on for almost 30 years — it was a process first described in United States patents in 1905. According to Dr Alan Holmes of the Leatherhead Food Research Centre, irradiation, like freezing, is useful for some foods and useless for others. The procedure involves passing gamma radiation through packaging and food, killing insects, organisms and bacteria.

Irradiated strawberries will last up to six weeks in a fridge or two weeks at room temperature, and irradiated potatoes and onions won’t sprout. But, after irradiation, milk tastes off, celery goes brown, and cabbage goes limp.

The fears are that irradiation makes food less nutritious — and, more importantly, that it may contain some as yet unidentified but dangerous “radiolytic” products.

But the tests themselves are unreliable and controversial. Feeding studies on animals in the United States, for example, were abandoned when it was found the animals sometimes had unbalanced diets, solely of a single

irradiated food. Many irradiation opponents — including the London Food Commission and the National Consumer Council — have called for moratoriums on the introduction of irradiation until adequate safety tests are developed. “Scientists around the world are trying to develop an effective test that will detect levels of irradiation in food, but this could take two to three years,” the London Food Commission’s director, Tim Lang, said last year.

Meanwhile, the British Government has to deal with reports of irradiated food entering the British market anyway. Illegal imports of irradiated shellfish have already been recorded and Labour members of Parliament have claimed irradiated strawberries and raspberries from the Netherlands have been put on sale in Britain. Until adequate tests are developed it is almost impossible to tell which foods are irradiated and which are not.

Many people predict it will be the weight of industry pressure and the lack of adequate evidence against the process that may force a favourable Government decision.