Could you imagine the difficulty trying to convince a French Cheese producer that irradiating his cheeses would be a good idea.

Sue is perfectly correct about the state of fruit and vegetables and their nutritional content. One little fact I heard recently from a friend who worked at the Scottish Crop Research Institute just down the road was about the average modern day tomato. It apparently has only 1/40 the nutritional value of a tomato from the 1940s. It probably also had 1/40 the taste value as well.

The modern supermarket values conformity and visual appearance even above shelf life. Irradiation is concerned about delaying the inevitable loss of food from rotting on the supermarket shelf. Irradiation will destroy some of the little available nutrients, which have through a combination including selectively breeding of the fruit and vegetable varieties together with the over use of the land used to grow the fruit and vegetables, reducing the nutrients that would have otherwise been available. Irradiation is simply about maximising profit by the food producers and supermarket chains by conning the consumer into thinking they are buying fresh fruit and vegetables.

Take the humble bag of lettuce salad leaves in a sealed plastic bag. Puncture the bag and the nitrogen only atmosphere will have been destroyed. Within 24 hrs those salad leaves will have begun to rot, probably because the bag could have been manufactured and produced nearly 6 weeks earlier.

Rather than purchasing irradiated food, even canned and frozen produce would probably be a better bet from a nutritional standpoint of view. Better still, pick and dig up, your own produced fruit and vegetables from your own garden. And if your lettuce happens to have a snail eating the same leaves then at least you'll know its at least worth eating.

The supermarkets are full to the ceiling of bland tasting, nutrionally poor but otherwise perfectly formed and beautifully identical fruit and veg. A bit like the cheese!!

Most folks need to go to countries like Cyprus, where they don't muck around with their fruit and veg, to sample just how tasty even a simple baked potato can be.