Am_Fear speaks good sense on this one - I don't know what they make of irradiation but a great resource for anyone are Michael Pollan's books, Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. They chronicle the rise of the modern day American diet, the overproduction of corn, and our society's increasing dependence on High Fructose Corn Syrup. It explains alot, and his basic advice is simple: Eat (natural) foods. Not too much. Mostly plants.

The modern American diet is decidedly unhealthy, but it doesn't have to be. For about the last 4 months I've gotten a box of organic fuits and vegetables from a local farm every other week, for $30 a pop. My family and I eat way better, with more variety, more gusto, and all my indicators are heading in a better direction than they were before. We eat it, or it goes to waste - irradiation is irrelevant to me as a means of preserving what I eat. Frozen and canned foods and MREs, those are my supplements and emergency supplies. Meantime eat like there's no tomorrow!

Welcome to the forum, Rebecca!

That's been my mantra for far too long and, due to poor food choices amd too much time sitting at a desk, it shows. Of course I justify my paunch by saying that it's part of my disaster preparedness stockpile.

There is an interesting article in today's NY Times about root cellars and other longer term food storage:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/garden/06root.html



I love Michael Pollan's books but he does point out that there really isn't that much difference between "organic" food carried at stores like Whole Foods and food found at a regular supermarket. His recommendation that we should all try to buy our food from producers that we can visit personally is just not practical for the vast majority of people even in a rich country like America.

Where I live, there is plenty of cactus, cotton, chili and even onions but not much else so Mr. Pollan's ideals are just silly to try to pursue here.

Hmm, it seems that adding nutrients to the soil to increase the nutritional value of the food produced from that soil is not much different from adding nutrients to the food after the fact, except that a goodly portion of the nutrients that go into the soil do not return to the food chain where we can get at them.

Nutrition is nutrition, and whether it is "organic" or local produce doesn't seem to count for much. When I go to someplace like Whole Foods, I find processed items labeled "organic" there with nutrition labels that don't vary significantly from the same generically labeled food items at the large grocery stores that cost me 1/3 as much. A box of Total cereal still delivers the same 100%+ nutrition per serving whether they label it organic or not. As for food additives for things like preservation or presentation, all I can say is these things have been around for a good long time, and people seem to be living much longer now on the average than they were when such additives were not being used at all. If there's all this toxic buildup in our food chain, how is it negatively affecting the general population? What I've seen in the past twenty years is more and more people overweight and out of shape, and subsequently more and more people coming down with diabetes, heart disease, etc. Maybe the best thing we can do for ourselves these days is to push away from the table a little sooner, and cut back on the 200+ channels of tv we glue into every night.

I think long before the issue of diminished nutrition becomes a factor is living a debilitating lifestyle. If you can get away from eating junk to eating real food, then that will go a lot farther towards improving your health than will upgrading from the apples sold at Walmart to the apples sold at the Farmer's market. There's a scaling factor, or law of diminishing returns, in that argument somewhere.

I believe that irradiation of food will be an increasingly important element of food safety, largely for economic reasons, in the future. I think the extensive use of chemical preservatives, like artificial fertilizers, will simply become too expensive, as well as being increasingly recognized as too environmentally and biologically unhealthy, over time.

I also think that the current global method of food production and distribution, where foodstuffs are produced in one nation or continent, processed in another, and perhaps sent back or to a third for consumption, will also be reduced for largely economic reasons in the future. It relies on comparatively cheap foreign labor and transportation, and those things are going away.

However, I don't foresee these being replaced by truly local, "organic" production anytime soon. Instead, I imagine that we will see increasing reliance on regional producers providing increased varieties of products appropriate for their region and season. This will be more affordable, sustainable, and less reliant upon petroleum-based transportation, chemicals and refrigeration. it will promote and require new agricultural methods, biodiversity and probably genetic engineering, too, and possibly create new markets for smaller farms.

I likewise foresee increasing demand for biofuels. Corn isn't the answer for that, but there will be resistance as long as the early caucuses and primaries are held in corn growing states, and those states keep re-electing senior congress members and senators. However, there is a huge potential market for American agriculture in producing affordable and renewable biomass alongside local food crops and animals that could revitalize smaller or marginal farms.

Corn, in the form of corn sweeteners, is also probably playing a role in the current obesity and diabetes epidemics. It appears that corn syrup is now in most all processed foods, and there is some alarming research on just how unhealthy that may be. Meanwhile, the American sugar lobby has it's hand in keeping the embargo on against Cuba, a potentially huge sugar supplier to the domestic food industry, to keep their prices artificially high. The days of large scale industrial corn monoculture are, or should be, numbered.

Just my two cents' worth.

Jeff