Would you like your eggs poached, fried, boiled… or irradiated?
If the Bushites get their way, producers of some eggs, fruits, veggies, and spices will be allowed to zap their products with a high dose of ionizing radiation – without bothering to tell us consumers about it. The food and drug administration has proposed a new rule okaying the use of radiation treatment to help extend the shelf life of the foods. This is a technological fix that can fatten the profits of the corporations, even though it can also do unpleasant things to the food’s taste, smell, and texture – as well as raising the price.
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Oh, and one more bit of unpleasantness. The health and safety impacts of dosing our edibles with a level of radiation that’s the equivlent of 33 million chest x-rays is, to say the least, problematic. So, the irradiators are making you part of a grand health experiment! Good luck!
Even when the FDA determines that a certain irradiated food should be labeled, Bush & Company propose to let them use the more benign phrase, “pasteurized,” rather than “irradiated.” This is because lobbyists for the big food processors complain that irradiation is a word that “has such a negative impact on the consumer that it acts as a warning label.”
Well, duh… yes! We should be warned that the food we buy and feed to our families has been zapped with radiation. If this process is perfectly safe, as the industry shills insist it is, why don’t they want us to know about it? If it’s a great consumer benefit, as the food processors claim, they should want to plaster the product with a big, bright label bragging: “Now Irradiated!”
This is Jim Hightower saying…. Why should we buy a process that corporations are afraid to put on their labels? FDA’s public comment period runs until July 5th. To tell ’em what you think, call Food and Water Watch: 202-797-6550.
“Bush Adminstration Proposes Easing Rules for Labeling Irradiated Foods,” Associated Press, reprinted at www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04//04/316, April 4, 2007
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