Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [79]
Food safety advocate Carol Tucker Foreman succinctly reinforced this last point in a comment to Consumer Reports: “After all, sterilized poop is still poop.”26
Despite such opposition, pressures to hide irradiation from consumers continued. In 2002, Congress passed the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act, mostly to authorize $190 billion in price supports for basic farm commodities, but also to equate irradiation (a radiation process) with pasteurization (usually understood as a heat process). The act requires the FDA to allow food labels to use pasteurized for any process that reduces pathogens in meat and poultry and to substitute this term for irradiation. This creative idea originated with Tom Harkin (Dem-IA), chair of the Senate agriculture committee, and a representative of the state housing the nation’s largest irradiation plant for ground beef.27 Even with such legislation, it is not clear whether the public will accept irradiated foods. Some experts believe that people will simply refuse to buy irradiated products; this possibility makes food producers so nervous that they all “want to be second to try it.”28 Some companies deliberately appeal to distrust of irradiation by advertising their products as nonirradiated. Fears of consumer resistance easily explain why the industry and its supporters pressed so forcefully for more attractive euphemisms such as “ionizing pasteurization” or “cold pasteurization.” Will euphemisms convince people to buy irradiated products? Surveys reveal that at least half of consumers do not like any term for irradiation.29
Other surveys, however, report the public to be relatively unconcerned about this process, leading its proponents to reassure the food industry that consumers will readily accept irradiated foods. One report to industry (costing $75 a copy) promises readers that most consumers think irradiation will prevent foodborne illness and reduce disease risk (85–90%) and that most would buy irradiated products even if they were labeled as such (80%). The report quotes the president of the Food Marketing Institute: “Food irradiation is one safety tool whose time has come! . . . As an industry, we must also have the courage to support irradiated food products in the marketplace. . . . We must not let those who are afraid to let consumers make their own judgments use misinformation and scare tactics to win arguments they would lose on the scientific merits of the issues.”30
Cost considerations, however, are likely to influence levels of outrage about this method, as may euphemistic labels so small as to be unnoticeable. Food technologists believe that when informed of the benefits of irradiation, the public will buy treated foods even if they cost more, as they most certainly will. Irradiation is expensive because of the equipment, the labels, and the transport from centralized facilities; the higher costs will be passed along to consumers. In 1997, USDA economists estimated that the cost to the beef industry alone could range from $28 million to $89 million annually, or from about 1.6 cents to 5 cents a pound. Although the costs to society of foodborne illness greatly exceed such amounts, and the additional price seems too small to make any difference to individual consumers, market comparisons suggest that a 10% premium for irradiated products would cause the proportion of people who might choose them to drop from 43% to 19%.31
This experiment is now underway. As irradiated foods increasingly enter the marketplace, the degree of acceptance by industry and the public will soon become evident. Furthermore, irradiation companies are using the anthrax scare of fall 2001 (discussed in the concluding chapter) to “do something they’ve been unable to do themselves: sell consumers on their controversial germ-zapping technology.”32 Even if consumers do opt to buy irradiated foods, the process is unlikely to solve