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Irradiation Changes the Farm
By Jeff Horwich, Minnesota Public Radio
March 16, 2001
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For about a month now, Huisken Meats has been making beef patties in the town of Sauk Rapids. While the company ponders whether to install its own irradiation equipment there, it already sends some some patties to a plant in Iowa, where a concentrated beam of electrons kills off E. coli, listeria, and other micro-organisms that affect thousands of Americans each year. Though it's been used for years on some chicken and vegetables, the Food and Drug Administration only recently approved irradiation for beef.
 Huisken Meats irradiated (right) and non-irradiated ground beef patties sit side-by-side in many Minnesota grocery stores. The back of the box (inset) is marked with the label for the irradiating technology, Surebeam®, and the official symbol for irradiation, the radura. (MPR Photo-Graphic/Jeff Horwich) |
The debate over the biological implications of irradiation remains heated, though major health and food safety organizations including the FDA, the American Medical Association, and the American Dietetic Association are confident in the safety of the process.
Activists from Ralph Nader to those lobbying the Sauk Rapids city council point to isolated studies that indicate irradiation can lead to diseased mice, chromosome damage in children, or decreased vitamin content in irradiated foods. Major investigations by key government agencies have dismissed or marginalized these findings, and majority opinion in the scientific community affirms that the process is safe.
IN SAUK RAPIDS, THE BATTLE is not over biology. The real science at stake in this small town is economics: a symbolic fight over the way we farm in the face of massive global demand for beef.
"If you watch animals that come out of the chutes, they're covered with feces because they've been packed together, they lay in it," says St. Cloud State microbiologist John Cronn. Cronn offers a frank description of why he believes the reality of modern beef processing makes irradiation a valuable - even necessary - innovation.
"When you bring them in and kill them they often defecate at that point, too," he says. "Even if you scrubbed them down after they were dead, you still wouldn't remove all the bacteria. In the process of skinning them, the outside of the meat is going to get contaminated," says Cronn.
This mass-processing of cows is a natural industry response to consumers who demand hamburger at less than $2.50 per pound. And when cows are occasionally killed and ground up with remnants of their own waste, most people would prefer the security of irradiation to the risk of E. coli. The disagreement hinges on whether we accept the 500-cow-per-day stockyard as an economic inevitability.
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It was simple economics that brought the entire Huisken Meats beef patty operation to Sauk Rapids. The local government put up $3 million in industrial bonds to sweeten the deal. Huisken officials are not saying when they might begin to irradiate meat here. But for now, an undisclosed number of the patties from this plant head to Iowa, for controlled doses of streaming electrons.
It's still too early to tell if irradiation will scare off shoppers or entice them, but Huisken president Dave Geiser doesn't have any mixed emotions.
"You see in excess of 5,000 deaths from food safety reasons each year. Irradiation does kill these organisms," Geiser says. "It's a simple concept."
Geiser sees irradiation as just one more safety measure to minimize the health risk to consumers who fail to fully cook their beef. When prodded to speculate on organic alternatives, Geiser doubts there are any that could satisfy the quantity and prices expected by consumers.
"If we went back and said, 'We're not going to use any chemicals on the land or any of those things,' what would happen to our food supply? I don't know whether it's possible to really have anything truly organic any more," says Geiser.
HOW WILL IRRADIATION AFFECT SMALL FARMS?
June Varner of Little Falls has a different opinion. "Irradiation supports the concentration of the food supply, to the detriment of the consumer and the detriment of the independent farmer," she says.
Varner and Stan Estes farmed 1,000 acres of organic crops and beef near Little Falls, before devoting most of the land to a conservation easement. They work locally on behalf of Minnesota COACT, a statewide group that has actively distributed anti-irradiation information.
"When you get animals out of the feedlot and into a natural environment, give them a natural diet of hay, they get rid of almost 100 percent of the E. coli," Varner says.
 The Radura |
She and Estes see irradiation as not just a reaction to current meat processing practices, but an excuse to continue them. With irradiation as a cure-all, they say large processors will be free to process more and more cows in less time - with dire results for rural communities built around small cattle farms. Estes also worries about irradiation's power as a marketing tool.
"If you can talk people into the fact that irradiation is much safer and healthier, and if it becomes mainstream, they would be able to raise their price 50 cents a pound or more," Estes says.
Irradiated patties do cost about 10 percent more in the supermarket. This probably reflects the cost of the technology more than the tastes of consumers, who have yet to send a clear signal that they're hungry for irradiated meat. Yet with the FDA unlikely to revoke its endorsement, the shape of tomorrow's beef business is less likely to be decided in the halls of government or corporate boardrooms, than in the butcher's aisle of the Sauk Rapids grocery.
Jeff Horwich covers central Minnesota for Minnesota Public Radio's Mainstreet unit. Reach him via e-mail at jhorwich@mpr.org.
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