Remember "cold fusion"? It sounded too good to be true. And
sure enough, say most scientists today, there was no
heat or light at the end of that tunnel.

Now
meet "cold pasteurization." This is one term of art --- "electronic
pasteurization" is another --- for what's usually called food irradiation.

The
concept of purifying by irradiation may be simpler than the nomenclature: You
simply expose the food to a potent source of radioactivity to kill the bad
stuff in it. (Not forever: Irradiation, however thorough, does not prevent the
growth of microbes, molds, and the like, on food afterward.)

But
there's a nagging question: Does irradiation also kill off nutrients and food
safety?

The matter may be on your
dinner table right now. Some spices and other ingredients have been irradiated
for years. But now food irradiation is coming to Rochester in a really big way,
via one product and a strong advertising campaign.

This
past May, Wegmans supermarkets started stocking up with Wegmans Brand Irradiated Fresh Ground Beef. The new product is the successor
to a similar irradiated hamburger from Fairview Farms, which Wegmans started
selling just a year earlier.

Rejecting
the euphemisms, Wegmans has been openly marketing its store-brand hamburger
under the term "irradiated." In fact, the company's putting a positive spin on
the term. A Wegmans' fact sheet (see at www.wegmans.com) says irradiation is "a
new step in food safety." But there's a gesture to history: The US Food and
Drug Administration, says the fact sheet, "has evaluated [irradiation] over the
last 40 years." The time lag reflects some historical complications. Like
commercial nuclear power, food irradiation grew from the "Atoms for Peace"
mentality of the 1950s.

Irradiation
is the shotgun approach to stopping food from doing what it does naturally
(spoiling during storage) and what is done to it unnaturally (for example,
picking up fecal contamination at the packinghouse).

Today lots
of foods are nuked, and we don't mean microwaved.

The federal
government okayed irradiation of wheat and wheat flour in 1963. Irradiation of
spices, poultry, and certain fresh produce came in due course. By the late
1990s, the Agriculture Department and the Food and Drug Administration had
opened the pasture gate pretty wide: In 1999, for example, the feds allowed raw
beef, pork, and lamb to be irradiated.

Whatever
the food, the idea is the same. Radioactive waves and particles --- in doses
millions of times higher than with an ordinary chest x-ray --- kill a range of
pathogens in the food and alter certain biochemical processes. For example,
high radiation levels can eliminate salmonella, listeria, and the intestinal
bacterium E. coli (a dangerous form
called O157:H7) from raw beef. Radiation also can stop white potatoes from
sprouting, and bottled spices from turning into insect nests.

Sometimes
the food is "treated" by exposing it to high radiation levels from cobalt-60 or
cesium-137. Cobalt-60 is familiar from its medical uses; with a half-life of a
little over 5 years, it decays to harmlessness in 50 to 100 years (that is, 10
to 20 half-lives; scientists and activists disagree over how to gauge a
radioactive isotope's "hazardous life.") Cesium, a byproduct of nuclear
fission, is an environmental pollutant with approximately a 30-year half-life.
That means cesium-137's "hazardous life" runs up to 600 years.

However,
the use of long-lived radioisotopes may be giving way to the "electron beam"
method of irradiation, which may go down easier in terms of production safety
and consumer acceptance. The beam, powered by electricity, does not produce
radioactive waste, nor does it have a material connection with commercial
nuclear waste --- like the spent fuel from nuclear power plants that may soon
move across our roads and railways toward Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

Here
at home, Wegmans is plowing ahead confidently with its irradiated
meat.

"For people
who want safe ground beef," says corporate spokesperson Mary Ellen Burris,
"this makes sense." The safety angle addresses the pitfalls of traditional
cooking: As Burris says, there have been many educational campaigns to get
people to cook their ground beef to an internal temperature of at least 160
degrees F --- enough heat to kill troubling pathogens like E. coli O157:H7. But cooks sometimes miss the mark, or their
hankering for rare meat outweighs the health considerations.

Then
there's the question of sanitation: If animals were raised and "processed"
(slaughtered and butchered) in squeakingly clean surroundings, and if fecal
matter and other contamination were kept away from the fresh meat, E. coli and the like wouldn't be such a
problem. "We agree that in a perfect world, it would be great to have that,"
says Burris.

E. coli haunts some "CAFOs,"
concentrated animal feeding operations, in which thousands of cattle, pigs, or
laying hens are kept in far-from-idyllic conditions --- and where the handling
of excrement is an industrial-strength task. (Perhaps the most famous local
CAFO is the Wegmans-owned farm in Wolcott, Wayne County, where hundreds of
thousands of caged hens lay eggs for the whole Wegmans chain.) But other places
can harbor E. coli. "You find it on
small farms and in petting zoos," says Wegmans' chief food scientist, Kathleen
O'Donnell.

Some
consumers may think that processed meat makes a simple journey from pasture to
store. But not so. For one thing, pasture-roaming, grass-fed cattle have given
way to CAFO-prodded, corn- and antibiotic-fed feedlot animals. For another
thing, food products of all sorts often are transcontinental and international
travelers.

Mary Ellen
Burris tells how Wegmans' irradiated ground beef gets from there to here. The
meat, she says, is packaged in a Kansas plant run by Excel Corporation. From
Kansas, the product moves to Chicago, where it's processed with electron-beam
irradiation at a plant run by the San Diego-based SureBeam Corporation. From
there the ground beef moves east to Wegmans stores in several states.

(A note on
Excel: According to the Washington Post,
in 1999-2000 USDA inspectors cited the company's Fort Morgan, Colorado, plant
for certain "defects," including "repetitive fecal findings on product." Burris
and Kathleen O'Donnell say such things don't apply to the Kansas plant; and
Excel, they say, has been using newer methods like "steam vacuuming" to keep things
clean.)

Why doesn't
Wegmans buy beef close to home? "We've not bought beef in New York State for as
long as I can remember," says Burris. New York, she says, is not a big beef
producer. Indeed, in 1998, says the state Department of Agriculture and Markets,
New York ranked 34th of 50 in production of cattle and calves.

It all
comes down to cost. Food is "as cheap as it is," says Burris, because of
economies of scale.

Yet Wegmans
also markets a higher-priced beef product that avoids some of what goes into
the irradiated beef. Burris says the chain's "Food You Feel Good About" beef is
produced "with traditional methods." This beef, she says, gives concerned
shoppers "a personal choice."

Activist
Judy Braiman's choice is to avoid irradiated foods.
More than that, Braiman, who's with the Empire State Consumers Association,
wants Wegmans to drop its new ground beef.

"What we're
really asking is what safety testing has been done on the product," says
Braiman. "Our issue," she says, "is not animal rights or vegetarianism, it's
safety, it's cleaning up the industry. They're zapping dirty meat, and we're
getting sanitized feces or pus."

Braiman
says she's not indicting the whole industry. But she and the groups she's
working with have a comprehensive critique of irradiation.

For
example, last December two Washington-based watchdogs, Public Citizen and the
Center for Food Safety, issued a report on irradiated food and its "potential
dangers." The report, Hidden Harm,
concentrates on "unique chemicals" in irradiated foods, and some dangers that
result from such chemicals. (Irradiation advocates don't deny that chemical
changes occur. Wegmans' Kathleen O'Donnell says "radiolytic compounds" will be
found is some treated foods. She likens these to the "thermolytic compounds" in
foods cooked at high temperatures. "None of the changes," she says, "have been
found to be dangerous.")

Some
radiolytic substances are common things like formic acid or glucose. But there
are other things on board. Hidden Harm
says that "when certain fats commonly found in food are irradiated, the
resulting byproducts include a unique class of chemical called cyclobutanones."
These chemicals, says the report, "have never been found to naturally occur in
any food." Peter Jenkins, policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety and
co-author of Hidden Harm, says
cyclobutanones have been found to cause "mutagenic and possibly carcinogenic
effects in animals."

And there's
more.

Citing
studies from the University of Massachusetts and the German government, Public
Citizen says that lab animals fed irradiated food have suffered cancer, vitamin
deficiencies, and premature death. Irradiation, says a fact sheet from the
group, can destroy vitamins, fatty acids, beta carotene, and change the food's
flavor and texture. "Irradiation disrupts the chemical composition of
everything in its path," the fact sheet concludes. (Proponents argue that
traditional cooking does things like this, too --- but when, say, irradiated
meat is prepared over a grill, it's being cooked a second time, multiplying the
chances for chemical change.)

Peter
Jenkins maintains that "there's not enough evidence" today to state confidently
that irradiation is safe. He says the FDA and other agencies have
"misinterpreted" some older evidence while failing to digest some newer
findings.

Jenkins
concedes that the "ion-beam approach is better" than the use of cesium-137 and
the like. The beam, he says, can't be used as a weapon or furnish the raw
radioactive material for a "dirty bomb." But the ion beam, he says, has the
same effects on food as other irradiation methods.

"I wouldn't
eat irradiated beef," says Jenkins, "and I especially wouldn't feed it to my
children."