Irradiation...

So the American Meat Institute  was pleased when their president, Patrick Boyle,  went on Larry King Live in October to discuss the topic. In his closing comments, Boyle stressed the industry’s commitment to beef safety and urged USDA to approve AMI’s long-standing petition to allow slaughterhouses to irradiate beef carcasses to eliminate the E.coli 0157:H7.

            Say again? Irradiation is the answer?

It’s no surprise that the solution industry creates to an industrialized problem is…more industrialization.

            Granted, E.coli 0157:H7 can be present in any size plant. But the skyrocketing prevalence of this pathogen is also linked to the industrialization of the meat system, where animals fattened on concentrated diets are processed in plants handling more than 4,000 head per day. Trim from these carcasses are then mixed and blended, with a typical ground beef patty containing the remnants of more than 60 cattle.

            Set aside for a moment the debate on whether irradiation is just a bigger version of a microwave oven, and ignore for the purposes of argument that federal law flat-out prohibits irradiation in any certified organic product. Irradiation kills pathogens. Heck, with enough irradiation, cow manure can be made safe to eat. Yum.

Looking to irradiation as a food-safety silver bullet is simply one more step along the path of consolidation that has been part of the problem. Large processors can easily afford expensive technology, and spread costs among the thousands of head processed each day. For smaller processors, irradiation represents one more expensive “solution” to solve a problem that they probably didn’t create.

There’s a different approach to addressing pathogens like E.coli 0157:H7, but that approach is more complex than zapping carcasses with irradiation.