The claim, and the awkward thing about it
The claim is that the public food supply is being irradiated deliberately and quietly — that a technology developed by the military and the Atomic Energy Commission was pushed into the grocery store over the objections of the agency meant to be checking it, and that what the public is told about it bears no relation to what is being done.
The awkward thing about the claim is that the first two-thirds of it is in the Federal Register and in the files of the Government Accountability Office. Food irradiation was a US Army programme. The Atomic Energy Commission did co-sponsor it. The Food and Drug Administration did approve a meat product on data it had not examined closely, and did withdraw that approval five years later after reading the data properly. Several of the companies that ran the irradiators were convicted of lying to federal inspectors.
What the record does not support is the last third: that any of this was aimed at the people eating the food, and that the eating is happening on anything like the scale the claim requires.
The Army programme
Patents for preserving food with ionising radiation date to 1905, and a US patent for killing Trichinella spiralis in meat with X-rays was granted in 1921. The modern programme is postwar and military. Between 1953 and 1980 the federal government ran the National Food Irradiation Program, under which the US Army and the Atomic Energy Commission sponsored a long series of research projects — the Army's interest being rations that would keep without refrigeration.
In 1958 Congress amended the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to define a source of radiation intended for use in processing food as a new food additive. That single definitional move put the whole programme under FDA jurisdiction and shelved the Army's plans for its own processing facilities: nothing could be sold without an additive approval.
The Army kept petitioning. It and the AEC filed for packaging materials between 1964 and 1968, approved in 1971. The Army and the Department of Agriculture petitioned for ham in 1966. In 1976 the Army contracted commercial laboratories to study the wholesomeness of irradiated ham, pork and chicken. In 1980 the programme was handed to the USDA.
The bacon approval, and why it was taken back
This is the episode the conspiracy case is built on, and it is real.
The Army petitioned in 1962. The FDA approved irradiated bacon in February 1963, and the GAO later found that the agency had done so largely on the basis of summaries of the petition data rather than the data itself. In 1968 the FDA went back and read the underlying material. It concluded that the submission did not establish that the product was safe, citing possible health problems in the test animals and flaws in both the design and the conduct of some of the experiments, and it withdrew the approval. The Army's 1966 ham petition rested on the same body of data and was withdrawn too.
No further approvals of substance followed for roughly fifteen years. The documented history here is not of a regulator waving the technology through; it is of a regulator approving one product carelessly, catching its own error, and reversing it.
What is actually approved, and when
The approvals are dated, numbered and public, in 21 C.F.R. 179.26:
- Wheat and wheat flour, 21 August 1963, insect de-infestation, 0.20 to 0.50 kiloGray.
- White potatoes, 8 July 1964, to inhibit sprouting, 0.05 to 0.15 kGy — the ceiling raised from 0.10 on 9 November 1965.
- Spices and dry vegetable seasonings, 5 July 1983, 10 kGy.
- Dry or dehydrated enzyme preparations, 10 June 1985.
- Pork carcasses and fresh cuts, 22 July 1985, to control Trichinella spiralis.
- Fruits, vegetables and spices, 1986, with the Federal Meat Inspection Act amended the same year.
- Poultry, FDA 1990 and USDA 1992, for salmonella and other foodborne bacteria.
- Refrigerated and frozen uncooked meat, FDA 1997 and USDA 2000.
- Fresh shell eggs, 2000, for salmonella.
The labelling symbol is the radura, developed and copyrighted in the Netherlands in the 1960s during United Nations-sponsored work there. The American version is drawn slightly differently from the one in the international Codex standard, with the leaves left hollow. Berkeley, California, under its nuclear-free zone ordinance, requires irradiated food for human consumption to be labelled "Treated with Ionizing Radiation" and bans irradiation facilities outright.
How much of the food supply
This is the number that does most of the work, and it comes from the GAO's own August 2000 report. As of January 2000, the total quantity of irradiated food in the United States was 97 million pounds a year, broken down as:
- Spices and dried aromatic vegetable substances: 95 million pounds — 9.5 per cent of annual consumption.
- Fruits and vegetables: 1.5 million pounds — 0.002 per cent.
- Fresh and frozen uncooked poultry: 0.5 million pounds — 0.002 per cent.
Beef, pork, lamb and goat had been approved and were not commercially available at all. Industry officials told the GAO that consumer reluctance was the main reason the technology had barely been used: a supermarket chain in the Chicago area and a Florida restaurant group were selling irradiated chicken and some fruit, and nationwide availability was, in the GAO's phrase, extremely limited.
Nine and a half per cent of the spice rack is not the food supply.
The part of the record that is genuinely bad
Where the suspicion has something solid under it is the conduct of the companies running the irradiators. A 2001 case study of five New Jersey plants, assembled from Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspection records, reads as follows.
At Whippany, operated by Isomedix and later STERIS, the plant failed five NRC safety inspections between 1986 and 1998. Violations included a 55-gallon drum of radioactive waste that could not be accounted for, and a mechanic taking more than a week's holiday before repairing a malfunctioning safety device. In 1994 inspectors found a cask holding a leaking cobalt-60 source; it had been leaking since 1976. Four years later there was still no disposal plan, and the company asked the NRC for a one-time exemption rather than pay to build a transport container. It agreed to build one in 1999.
At Parsippany, also Isomedix, the plant's radiation director took a near-fatal dose of 400 rems in June 1974 and spent a month in hospital. Two years later a fire near the cobalt storage pool released chemicals that corroded the rods until they leaked; the contaminated water was flushed down a toilet into the public sewer. The concrete around the pool and the bathroom plumbing were later found to be radioactive and sent to a nuclear waste dump. How much went into the sewer was never determined.
At Dover, two senior executives of International Neutronics were indicted in June 1986 on federal charges of conspiracy, mail fraud and wire fraud over an October 1982 spill of 600 gallons of water contaminated with cobalt-60. Workers had been told to pour it down a shower drain into the public sewer, and to wear their radiation badges in a way that would falsify the readings. A federal prosecutor said the executives had "bamboozled" NRC inspectors by delaying an inspection of a facility where food, gems, chemicals and medical supplies were irradiated. The clean-up cost $2 million. The company's vice-president, Eugene O'Sullivan — a former member of the Atomic Energy Commission — was convicted of conspiracy and fraud in October 1986.
At Rockaway, Radiation Technology's record ran two decades. In 1977 a worker took a dose of 150 to 300 rems when a protective system failed; in 1986 the NRC cited company executives for having disabled it deliberately. In 1988, after more than thirty NRC violations — one of them for putting radioactive waste out with the household rubbish — the company's president, Martin Welt, and its nuclear engineer, William Jouris, were charged with eleven counts of conspiracy to defraud the NRC, making false statements, and violating the Atomic Energy Act. Welt, who had threatened to sack workers who would not lie to investigators, was also charged with obstruction of justice. Both were convicted; Jouris was given probation, and Welt two years in prison, three years' probation and a $50,000 fine. The company had already been the subject of a federal enforcement action under the Atomic Energy Act in 1981.
What that adds up to
Read together, the record describes a military research programme that became a civil technology, a regulator that approved one product on inadequate data and reversed itself, and an industry with a run of criminal convictions for lying about safety failures — several of which put radioactive water into municipal sewers.
It does not describe a plan to irradiate the public's food without telling them. The approvals are published with dates and dose ceilings. The treated products carry the radura by law. And the quantity actually treated, in the one year for which the GAO assembled a full figure, was 97 million pounds, nearly all of it seasoning. The thing the claim says is being done at scale is the thing the industry spent fifty years failing to persuade anyone to buy.