A US molecular biologist has claimed that serving up irradiated beef is a far safer option than serving it up under cooked.
Food irradiation is rarely out of the headlines in the US these days, as irradiated meat is about to be introduced as part of the national school lunch programme as early as next year.
Speaking yesterday at the IMRP 2003 Conference in Chicago, the scientist and expert on food irradiation claimed there is a greater safety risk of eating non-irradiated hamburgers cooked well done than in eating irradiated burgers cooked medium or even rare. "It's not the meat, it's the heat," said Morton Satin, author of Food Irradiation: A Guidebook, who spent 16 years with the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations.
"The principal function of food irradiation in food safety is to minimise the risk of pathogens," said Satin. "In this cold process, authoritative scientific studies have made it clear that no new hazards are introduced. But cooking meat well done to an internal temperature of 160 degrees - the most common method for reducing foodborne hazards- introduces a whole range of new problems whose significance is just becoming known."
Based on data from the National Cancer Institute, MIT, Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and other institutions, cooking foods to a well-done state increases the amounts of heterocyclic products produced and consumed in the diet. "This increases the risk of a range of conditions including colorectal adenomas, adenocarcinoma of the stomach and esophagus and breast, lung and prostate cancer," Satin said. "Parents, dieticians, nutritionists and administrators are pouring their hearts into the irradiated ground beef debate without the benefit of all the facts," Satin believes. "If they had all the facts and understood the negative effects of high-temperature, well-done cooking, they would consider the matter differently. In all likelihood, they would regard food irradiation to be a godsend for school lunch food safety."
Satin is recommending a broad-based review on the relative risks of consuming irradiated foods cooked medium or even rare versus the risk of eating unirradiated foods that are cooked well-done, where they lose most of their flavour and texture.
"If we conclude that using heat as a primary process to reduce the risk of pathogens poses a greater risk to consumers than the use of irradiation for the same purpose, then we must consider irradiation mandatory for certain classes of high risk foods. We will not only have safer foods, but they will taste a hell of a lot better."
The many opponents to food irradiation, in both the US and Europe, will undoubtedly closely mark Satin words. Currently the US advocacy group Public Citizen is mounting a major campaign against the use of food irradiation for school lunch programme, citing a lack of scientific evidence to prove its safety.