NEWS ANALYSIS : Irradiation: The Waiting Game

Imagine you’re an executive grappling with a continuing corporate image problem.

* News reports repeatedly chronicle elevated contamination rates in your company’s only food product.

* Sales are at near record levels but the damaging stories on harmful bacteria have shaken consumer confidence.

* Advocacy groups and members of Congress call for significant changes in your production methods or, worse yet, for warning labels.

* Billions of dollars in annual revenue are potentially at stake.

Then, almost overnight, the federal government, in a rare case of unanimity between two warring agencies, expeditiously approves a technology to solve the contamination problem. The method, under study for decades, is used regularly by other countries such as France, the Netherlands, South Africa and Thailand without incident.

It seems as though the scene is set for a miracle cure and a painless increase in business.

Except this case is far from routine: The product is chicken; the contaminant is Salmonella, one of the leading causes of food poisoning in the country, and the newly approved technology is irradiation.

So what happens next in the high-level meeting rooms of the poultry industry? Do corporate heads embrace the new process? Do they announce ambitious product-testing and consumer-marketing programs?

Actually, they do nothing. At least, that’s what they did last September when the above factors converged. And that’s because irradiation--the process of exposing food to gamma rays from cobalt 60 at a dose high enough to destroy bacteria but low enough to prevent molecular changes--suffers from its own image problem.

Because it is under the scrutiny of Congress, advocacy groups and the media, the poultry industry won’t touch irradiation today. In fact, many corporations have signed pledges to shun the procedure--despite the fact that major magazines and television news programs have recently produced flattering reports about the technology’s perceived benefits.

Sound crazy? Welcome to the world of food irradiation.

This controversy is stranger than most and not just because the cobalt 60 glows an eerie blue when safely submerged in its coolant tank secured in a room with 6-foot-thick cement walls.

The opposing sides believe there are no gray areas here. And because of this stalemate, decision making is frozen throughout the food chain, beginning with the poultry industry, moving onto the food-processing companies and coming to rest with the major supermarket chains.

No one wants to touch irradiated food. And they certainly don’t want to sell it with a required label, which looks like a sign for an air raid shelter.

Scientists say irradiation can solve bacterial contamination problems such as Salmonella-tainted raw chicken, reduce overall food poisonings in the United States and help protect immuno-compromised individuals who are highly susceptible to food-borne illnesses.

Critics say irradiation is a phantom silver bullet designed to clean up food that shouldn’t be “dirty” in the first place, that it will lead to the proliferation of irradiation plants, increasing workplace hazards, and may pose some long-term health problems--which have yet to be documented--in those who consume the food.

Until irradiation was approved in September by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to control Salmonella, Camphylobacter and Listeria in chicken, the process was permitted only on spices, flour, pork, fruit and vegetables. (The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is also considering a proposal to allow irradiation of molluskan shellfish, which have one of the nation’s worst food safety records.)

Yet the only measurable use of the technology to date has been on spices. Between 15% and 20% of the spices sold in this country are exposed to irradiation to control bacteria, insects and filth, according to estimates. Limited consumer tests of irradiated produce--strawberries, papayas, mangoes--have also been conducted in California, Florida and Illinois.

But the bottom line is that the vast majority of Americans have never been exposed to, nor even seen, irradiated food; only astronauts get a steady diet of it and only while they’re in space. Ironically, it is much more likely that consumers have been treated with medical or surgical equipment that has been sterilized by irradiation than that they have eaten anything exposed to industrial cobalt 60.

Despite the fact that irradiation is almost untested in this country, 35% of those surveyed in a recent poll consider it a “serious hazard.” The survey, conducted in early 1992 for the Food Marketing Institute, also found that 28% said irradiation was “something of a hazard,” 10% said it was not a hazard at all and 27% were not sure.

The high negatives remain even though scientists and researchers are leading a chorus of cheers for irradiation safety. This month the Journal of the American Medical Assn., in reporting on two significant outbreaks of food poisoning, endorsed food irradiation in an editorial. “Irradiating food is a practical and safe means of reducing bacterial counts to an acceptable range,” the journal stated.

Stuck in this gridlock is Mulberry, Fla.-based Vindicator Inc., the nation’s only irradiation plant designed for food processing. For weeks, company officials have been saying that the first irradiated raw chicken will soon be in supermarket meat counters. But the firm has been plagued by a string of production delays, the most recent being a problem with packaging. According to Jim Greene, a USDA spokesman, the materials originally selected by Vindicator for wrapping individual chickens did not meet federal standards. Another supplier must be found to manufacture the special absorbent pad that sits in the meat tray.

In addition, several major chicken producers refuse to sell Vindicator any birds to irradiate for resale, according to both company officials and government representatives.

Earlier this year the National Broiler Council, which represents 90% of the chicken producers, claimed it was neutral on the issue.

“Irradiation does nothing that cannot be accomplished by normal cooking of the product,” the council stated. “The broiler industry neither supported nor opposed the petition . . . to authorize irradiation. At present, there is little or no interest in the industry in the irradiation process.”

The poultry industry’s dilemma is complex. If it embraces irradiation, it’s tacitly acknowledging that Salmonella contamination has reached such a level that extraordinary measures are needed to stem the tide. This is an especially difficult situation for an industry that refuses to place even basic cooking, storage or handling directions on its current packages, for fear the instructions might imply that some kind of problem exists.

“Is irradiation safe? Hell, yes,” says Sam Whitney, president and founder of Vindicator. “Is some food unsafe? You bet. But the government and the food industry do not want to admit that some food is contaminated. Salmonella, for one, is getting worse every day. Why can’t we sell irradiated food to help solve this?”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, there were 48,154 confirmed cases of Salmonellosis in 1991, a figure that it says represents only 10% or fewer of the actual number of illnesses. The number of cases actually linked to contaminated chicken is unknown. The National Broiler Council claims beef and turkey are responsible for more such food poisoning outbreaks than chicken.

Whitney says he has 27 or 28 supermarket clients that want an opportunity to sell irradiated chicken but that the major chicken processors are trying to “stonewall” the process.

And an executive with a major Southern California supermarket chain recently bemoaned the situation, saying: “Irradiation would solve a lot of problems but the public just isn’t ready for it yet.”

Neither, it seems, are any food industry executives.