Do you remember the E. coli outbreak two years ago that started with contaminated spinach? Fresh spinach was virtually unavailable for weeks until the crop was declared safe again. Now, FDA has announced their solution to avoiding future outbreaks: spinach and other greens will be irradiated before being sold to consumers. Food and Water Watch has the details on the new policy. Radiation will kill any dangerous bacteria and ensure that our veggies are safe to eat.
Really?
First, let’s talk about the potential risks of using radiation on food. What are the long term effects on us, as eaters? No one knows, not exactly. While FDA has declared this method to be safe, we’ve learned in the past few years that the current FDA is not an agency that bravely puts consumer health above industry interests. (Pet food from China, anyone?) Many scientists have come forward to challenge the new rule, saying that while there’s no evidence that irradiated spinach is unsafe, there’s no conclusive evidence that it’s safe, either. Remember, we used to think that pesticides were perfectly safe on our food; now there’s a whole lot of evidence to the contrary. Personally, I’d like to see a little more reassurance than agribusiness telling me irradiation is safe.
But what really drives me nuts is that this is just another layer of treatment and hacked solutions to the problems industrial agriculture has created. It seems like this is always how it goes: when new farming practices cause a problem, add another practice to cover up the problem, instead of eliminating the source. Why does spinach get infected with E. coli? Should we change our practices to keep bacteria from being introduced? No, lets use radiation to kill them after the fact, because that’s easier and cheaper. Are cows and chickens getting sick because they’re living in their own waste, crammed into tiny spaces with no room even to spread their wings? Instead of giving them more space and a clean living environment, let’s pump them full of antibiotics, because that’s cheaper and easier. (Then, let’s placate those liberals who think that eating antibiotic-laden meat year after year might weaken our immune systems or create resistant bacteria.) Is our new genetically-modified corn more prone to disease than those old-fashioned varieties that can’t be grown so close together? We’ll sell farmers a new pesticide that combats the diease, so we can get them to buy even more of our products.
Even after reading a lot about it, I still have trouble understanding why adding layer upon layer of solutions to the problems we created in our food system is more economically sound than going back to the basics of farming that produced healthy food for millenia… except that, if the company who created the problem sells the solution back to the farmers, they get more profit. I’m not sure what’s in it for the farmer.
Now, there’s a proposal on the table to eliminate labeling requirements for irradiated vegetables – if it passes, we’ll have no way to know whether our food was irradiated or not, so we don’t even get the power to choose whether it’s a risk we’re willing to take. It’s clear to me that labeling benefits the consumer, giving us options and keeping us informed. And it seems like it only benefits industry to remove the labelling – if we can’t tell that radiation is being used, how can we protest against it?
If you want the power to at least know whether your spinach is irradiated or not, write a letter to Congress now and ask them to maintain these labeling requirements!