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Shortly after the United States Food and Drug Administration (PDA) declared beef exposed to gamma radiation fit for human consumption in 1997, several supermarket chains began selling irradiated ground beef. Recent incidents in which thousands of Americans had been poisoned and several had died from eating hamburgers contaminated by Escherichia coli (E. coli) O157:H7 bacteria seemed to have created a market for meat that could be proved safe to eat. One of the chains, Wegmans Food Markets, distributed a pamphlet introducing its new product as a marvel of modern technology. Adorned with pictures of happy families and plump burgers, the brochure struck a nostalgic tone, inviting consumers to "stop worrying about E. coli and start enjoying great-tasting hamburgers cooked the way you like them"-juicy red.'
The pamphlet did not mention the fifty-year history of food irradiation in the United States, a history fraught with high expectations, regulatory uncertainty, and determined grass-roots opposition. That would have exposed the sale of irradiated foods as a bold and economically risky experiment. Many people had predicted the imminent and wide-scale commercialization of irradiated foods during the 1950s and 1960s, but when the FDA finally began to approve irradiation as a food preservation and sterili/.ation process in the 1980s a vocal opposition coalesced. The opposition built public resistance to irradiated foods by casting doubts on their wholesomeness, identifying potential dangers from irradiation facilities, and questioning the nuclear and food industries' role in promoting the process.2 Most food processors and supermarkets avoided irradiated foods, afraid they would attract unfavorable media attention and scare away customers.
The decision by Wegmans and other stores to sell irradiated ground beef in the late 1990s indicates that circumstances have changed. Food purveyors may have decided that irradiation's virtues-reducing food-borne pathogens and extending the shelf life of foodstuffs-will clinch its commercial success. But in the long history of food irradiation its commercial fate has been influenced not only by its technical characteristics but also by a web interacting forces: industry and government support, domestic regulation, international acceptance, and prevailing attitudes about food, public health, and the environment. Most important, the fortunes of food irradiation have been closely linked to those of the nuclear industry as a whole.3
There have been many works published on food irradiation...