"I am still waiting for the government to allow us to irradiate foods en masse..."

Why bother? The food we get from land farmed by conventional chemical agriculture isn't the nutritious stuff we think and hope it is. If you had the food you eat analyzed, you would discover that it's missing a lot of nutrients. Just because a food can contain certain minerals and vitamins doesn't mean it does. Most of the big corporate farms in America only fertilize with the Big Three: Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium. They don't give a rat's patootie that most of their soil is lacking calcium, magnesium, sulfur, boron, molybdenum, copper, iron, zinc, or any of the trace minerals, all vital for a healthy body.

But if all the food that is harvested was good, nutrient-dense fare, irradiation would cancel it out. Irradiation doesn't just kill bacteria, it destroys vitamins, and not just at the time of the irradiation treatment, but the loss will continue in storage, and more will be lost when it is cooked (more in irradiated food than non-irradiated food).

If you have a head of irradiated romaine lettuce that can sit in a truck and then on a shelf for three months without rotting -- its nutrient value would have deteriorated so much that you would only get a fraction of the original nutrition, so what's the point?

The people pushing irradiation don't care about food quality or human health as much as they want a cheap way to kill nasty bacteria on filthy food. They can't be bothered to do a good, clean job, they just want a quick fix, a way to destroy the garbage that their sloppy production methods are adding to the food, so they don't have to change how they currently butcher animals and handle raw food. Providing us with clean food is not the issue. It never was.

Hamburger contaminated with intestinal contents and then irradiated, is still hamburger contaminated with intestinal contents. An irradiated steak with a coating of steer manure is still a steak coated with steer manure. Just because the E. coli is dead doesn't make it good food. Well, I don't think so, anyway. YMMV.

Read Zapped! Irradiation and the Death of Food by Wenonah Hauter and Mark Worth. It's ten bucks at AcresUSA. Then see if irradation seems like such a great idea.

We have met the enemy and he is us. --Walt Kelly

Sue