Radiant Cuisine: The Commercial Fate of Food Irradiation in the United States

Shortly after the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) declared beef exposed to gamma radiation fit for human consumption in 1997, several supermarket chains began selling irradiated ground beef. Recent incidents in which thousands of Americans had been poisoned and several had died from eating hamburgers contaminated by Escherichia coli (E. coli) O157:H7 bacteria seemed to have created a market for meat that could be proved safe to eat. One of the chains, Wegmans Food Markets, distributed a pamphlet introducing its new product as a marvel of modern technology. Adorned with pictures of happy families and plump burgers, the brochure struck a nostalgic tone, inviting consumers to "stop worrying about E. coli and start enjoying great-tasting hamburgers cooked the way you like them"—juicy red.¹

The pamphlet did not mention the fifty-year history of food irradiation in the United States, a history fraught with high expectations, regulatory uncertainty, and determined grass-roots opposition. That would have exposed the sale of irradiated foods as a bold and economically risky experiment. Many people had predicted the imminent and wide-scale commercialization of irradiated foods during the 1950s and 1960s, but when the FDA finally began to approve irradiation as a food preservation and sterilization process in the 1980s a vocal opposition coalesced. The opposition built public resistance to irradiated foods by casting doubts on their wholesomeness, identifying potential dangers from irradiation facilities, and questioning the nuclear and food industries' role in promoting the process.² Most food processors and supermarkets avoided irradiated foods, afraid they would attract unfavorable media attention and scare away customers.

The decision by Wegmans and other stores to sell irradiated ground beef in the late 1990s indicates that circumstances have changed. Food purveyors may have decided that irradiation's virtues—reducing food-borne pathogens and extending the shelf life of foodstuffs—will clinch its commercial success. But in the long history of food irradiation its commercial fate has been influenced not only by its technical characteristics but also by a web interacting forces: industry and government support, domestic regulation, international acceptance, and prevailing attitudes about food, public health, and the environment. Most important, the fortunes of food irradiation have been closely linked to those of the nuclear industry as a whole.³

There have been many works published on food irradiation in the United States, but no scholarly histories.⁴ In filling that gap, this article details an episode in American technological development that may culminate in much of the country's bill of fare being exposed to gamma radiation. Because this corner of the nuclear industry involves food, something essential to people's lives and well-being, from the beginning it offered Americans a personal link to the atom. That intimate connection lent poignancy to an otherwise mundane high-tech process. It enabled early boosters to treat irradiated foods as a nourishing fulfillment of the promise of the atomic age and later critics to condemn them as prosaic examples of the dangers posed by nuclear technology. These attitudes framed public discourse about food irradiation, bolstering or inhibiting its commercial prospects by turns. They also fed into a larger public debate, providing Americans a gut-level opportunity to judge the risks and benefits of atomic technology.

Grand Expectations

In the first years of the atomic age, Americans were often ambivalent about harnessing the atom's power. Many celebrated the atom bomb for ending World War II and enhancing the country's international standing, but dreaded strikes on their own cities.⁵ While the Civil Defense Office's community-preparedness exercises and booklets sought to make the citizenry feel secure, many Americans, prominent public figures among them, expressed anxiety about nuclear weapons throughout the cold war.⁶ Speaking to the Chamber of Commerce of the United States in 1956, Arch Booth, the Chamber's executive vice president, showed a film of a mushroom...