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All irradiation will do is add partially decontaminated fecal matter to the American diet, a practice that is likely to cause food poisoning cases to skyrocket when bacteria develop the survival tactics to resist irradiation. All past efforts to “eradicate” microbial organisms . . . have succeeded only in creating new generations of super bugs, and irradiation will be no different. . . . The solution to the food safety problem is to produce safe food (emphasis added).33

Like many other food safety matters, irradiation raises issues of societal values that extend beyond the scientific. To questions about costs and benefits must be added others about the safety of those employees who work with and transport hazardous radioactive materials, and the environmental effects of discarding surplus sources of gamma rays. From a value-based perspective, irradiation is a techno-fix: a short-term corrective to a late-stage contamination problem that should be addressed much earlier in the chain of production.

ALTERNATIVE #3: PASTEURIZE

Technical solutions to food safety problems are linked, as we have seen, to conflicts between science and other kinds of value systems. The Odwalla company’s corporate policy valued “fresh” and “natural,” and it took a lethal outbreak to convince its managers to apply basic principles of microbiology to production processes; the company now pasteurizes its juices (in the old sense of the term). Many of my friends who are chefs or specialty food producers strongly believe that the sensory and cultural values of traditional raw or undercooked foods far outweigh the small risk of acquiring a foodborne infection. Raw (unpasteurized) milk—and cheeses made from it—have become rallying points for such views. For years, raw milk foods have caused rare but occasionally lethal outbreaks of Listeria, Salmonella, E. coli O157:H7, and other pathogens. The catalog of foodborne outbreaks maintained by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) reported just 11 from raw milk and 8 from cheeses made with raw milk during the 11-year period from 1990 to 2001.34 These numbers seem excessively high to the people who became ill from eating the foods, to the families of those who died, and to safety officials who want such foods pasteurized. The number of outbreaks appears minor, however, to people who prize such foods for their taste subtleties and cultural traditions and who believe that such benefits outweigh what seems like an occasional risk. In the case of raw milk foods, the choice is voluntary, and the foods generate little dread or outrage.

The risks are not equally distributed, however. Raw milk and soft cheeses such as the Mexican queso fresco are implicated most often; these are particularly dangerous when contaminated with Salmonella or other bacteria resistant to multiple antibiotics.35 Harder domestic and foreign imported cheeses also have caused outbreaks and such incidents—rare though they may be—invariably elicit demands for mandatory pasteurization and restricted import of raw milk cheeses. As explained by an Oregon food safety expert, Dr. William Keene:

Even after almost 100 years of effort, medical and public health experts have been unable to eliminate raw milk consumption. Raw milk has been and continues to be a staple in the epidemiological literature, linked to a long list of diseases. . . . There is no mystery about why raw milk is a common vehicle for salmonellosis and other enteric infections; after all, dairy milk is essentially a suspension of fecal and other microorganisms in a nutrient broth. Without pasteurization or other processing to kill pathogens, consumption of raw milk is a high-risk behavior.36

Dr. Keene points out that the aging and drying processes required to make many kinds of cheeses will kill most pathogens, but soft cheeses are “well documented hazards.” Defenders of raw milk cheeses, who would be appalled by his characterization of dairy milk as a broth of fecal bacteria, seize on the protective