FDA Allows Irradiation of Leafy Greens

Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO -- Food safety experts generally say that zapping spinach and lettuce with a tiny shot of radiation is the best way to vanquish deadly outbreaks of E. coli. It's safe, too, they say and the federal government officially agreed Thursday, allowing so-called irradiation of our leading leafy greens.

But whether irradiation ever takes hold is in the hands of consumers, and they've shown resistance to a process whose very name has a glow-in-the-dark ring to it. Federal regulators years ago declared irradiation of red meat as safe, but beef producers have hardly flocked to the technology.

Irradiation can require food producers to sink several million dollars into new equipment, or pay others to zap their wares. Those investments will produce little return if consumers won't buy food they know is irradiated.

"There is still a big consumer concern about irradiated products and I think that is the single biggest issue," said Martin Cole, head of the National Center for Food Safety and Technology at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

However, "the scientific community looks at it safety wise as that there's nothing wrong with it at all."

The Food and Drug Administration's irradiation action is aimed at forestalling outbreaks of E. coli in fresh produce like the one that swept through spinach in 2006, killing three people and sickening nearly 200. And irradiation technology has now advanced enough that it won't leave greens limp, food safety experts say.

The FDA ruling is based on a petition in the late 1990s from the Grocery Manufacturers Association, a trade group. Robert Brackett, an association senior vice president, heralded the decision for advancing food safety.

But Brackett acknowledged irradiation should increase production costs, adding up to five cents of expense per pound of bagged salad. "It's going to be a business decision as to whether (producers) use it or not."

Irradiation will primarily be used for bagged spinach and lettuce. Those bags must sport labels denoting irradiation, and also display the "radura," the international symbol for radiation.

In the case of spinach and lettuce, irradiation is aimed at destroying the DNA of E. coli and salmonella, two well-known instigators of food-borne illness. To be irradiated, food is packed into containers and moved by a conveyor belt into a shielded room. There, it's hit by gamma rays or electron beams.

Either method is the safety equivalent of a person walking through an x-ray detector at an airport, said Michael Doyle, head of the University of Georgia's Center for Food Safety. "It is a safe process. You are not going to glow in the dark." The problem is, people often perceive the latter.

Taking a lunch break Thursday at the Sweet Tomatoes salad buffet in Schaumburg, Ill., Krista Evans' eyes widened at the thought of irradiated lettuce. "That doesn't sound safe," said Evans, 27.

Her friend, Dandy Tomczyk, agreed: "I think of radiation and I think of cancer," she said.

Acceptance of irradiated food would get a boost if it didn't have to be labeled as such, Doyle said. There's a food industry proposal before the FDA to do just that, allowing food processors to use the broad term "pasteurized" for several processes that kill pathogens, including irradiation.

The idea is "to get people to focus on what a (pasteurization) process does, rather than how it does it," said Brackett.

But Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said changing irradiation labeling rules would confuse consumers. "We really think the manufacturers just want to hide the process from the public."

The Center for Science in the Public Interest is often at loggerheads with the FDA, but it agrees with the agency's findings on irradiation safety. Smith DeWaal, though, said irradiation is not a "silver bullet" for produce, since it doesn't kill virus-born food illnesses.

And she said she thinks the produce industry won't adopt it en masse. "It hasn't been a commercial success in the beef industry, and I don't expect that it will be anymore so here."

Irradiation of beef has been allowed since 2000. Yet only about 15 million pounds of the roughly 8 billion pounds of beef processed annually is irradiated, said Dennis Olson, an Iowa State University meat scientist and irradiation expert.

The beef industry liked the concept, but didn't want to promote irradiation because of consumer concerns, he said. Olson's old employer and one of the biggest irradiation providers, SureBeam, did much of the marketing directly to grocery stores.

But SureBeam couldn't generate sales to cover its own investment, and went bankrupt in 2004. Since then, beef producers have developed other cleaning methods to fend off pathogens, largely leaving irradiation behind, Olson said.

(Chicago Tribune reporter Vikki Ortiz contributed to this report.)

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