NUKING YOUR BURGERS?

For Bill Clinton and other hamburger-loving Americans, nothing could have been scarier. At the height of the barbecue season last August, more than a dozen people became seriously ill from ground beef contaminated by a virulent strain of bacteria known as E. coli 0157:H7, which was traced to a Columbus, Neb., processing plant. The incident prompted the nation’s largest meat recall, a whopping 25 million lbs. of beef patties. It also brought a vow from gourmand Clinton to wage a major war for food safety.

Last week the Food and Drug Administration unleashed the war’s ultimate weapon. It approved use of nuclear irradiation to rid beef of the mutant E. coli, as well as salmonella, listeria and other dangerous pathogens implicated in the millions of cases of food poisoning in the U.S. that cost some 9,000 lives each year. Dubbed “cold pasteurization” by the food industry, the controversy-plagued technology uses powerful gamma rays released by the common medical radioisotope cobalt 60 or streams of high-energy electrons from an accelerator. The bug-zapping power of the process is undisputed. The ionizing radiation, millions of times stronger than ordinary X rays, kills molds, bacteria and small insects by wrecking their DNA, while leaving the exposed food virtually unchanged and radiation free. As a side benefit, it also eliminates the need for fumigants.

Even so, Americans are unlikely to find irradiated beef in supermarkets or fast-food emporiums very soon. This is not only because of the public’s almost irrational fear of anything nuclear–or the threats of stepped-up opposition by such anti-irradiation activists as the Vermont-based group Food & Water. Even major food companies, while publicly lauding the FDA decision as long overdue, privately confess they are not all that eager to implement it. Before investing in the costly shielded radiation rooms that will be needed to sterilize fresh or frozen meat on an assembly-line basis (and will add 3[cents] or 4[cents] to the retail price of chopped sirloin), they want to gauge consumer demand. Admits John Masefield, chief executive of the Whippany, N.J., medical sterilization company Isomedix, whose three-year-old petition prompted the FDA action: “A lot of people want to be second.”

Or even lower down. Wheat and flour have been cleared for irradiation since 1963, and over the years spices, pork, fruits and vegetables and poultry have been added to the FDA list. Yet despite the overwhelming endorsement of many health authorities, including the American Medical Association and the World Health Organization–and despite the FDA’s renewed assurances last week that radiation at its recommended dosages affects neither a food’s taste nor its nutritional value in any detectable way–irradiated poultry, vegetables and fruits are almost as rare as Iranian caviar in U.S. markets. Though NASA has long irradiated food for space flights, the only widely sold “nuked” consumer products on U.S. terra firma are baby-bottle nipples, cosmetics, bandages, tampons, contact-lens cleaning fluids, juice and milk cartons and wine corks.

But food experts sniff a change in the air. The series of recent high-visibility incidents of E. coli poisoning has heightened public concerns about contaminated beef–and inspired food producers to experiment with such alternative sterilization techniques as steam pasteurization of beef carcasses and exposure of food to ozone, a highly reactive form of oxygen. Yet while these methods are cheaper and do not require the handling of radioactive material or disposal of nuclear wastes, they fail a critical test. Aside from cooking, only irradiation is penetrating enough, say the experts, to come close to meeting new federal guidelines mandating “zero tolerance” for microbial contamination of ground beef, which, unlike pork or poultry, is often eaten rare. Still, before irradiated beef can become available, the Department of Agriculture must issue new regulations for its processing and labeling, which makes it unlikely, says a departmental official, that you’ll find zapped beef patties in meat coolers before next summer’s barbecues. Meanwhile, better hold that steak tartare.