Food Irradiation.
This article is basically a neutral explanation of food irradiation. It includes all the information, the positives and the negatives.
More or less this is a form of pasteurization (sorry Louis) that doesn't require any heat to be applied to the food. This is good because by nature heat changes the flavor of foods, and you don't want to taste scalded milk when you take a bite of cheerios. Food irradiation works by exposing food to low doses of gamma rays (highly energized electromagnetic radiation caused by nuclear decay), X-rays, and a beam of electrons. As most people know radiation can kill cells by interrupting their DNA. this causes bacteria to die but no change in taste of the food.
But don't things absorb radiation you might ask? Yes they do, it is very easy to make something radio active, like rubbing a magnet over a pin, but you need a lot of magnet and a lot of rubbing to make the pin. Same with radiation, you need a significant amount to cause a secondary object to become harmful. So with food so little radiation is used it doesn't literally irradiate your milk, it just kills bacteria. the problem lies in producing the radiation used.
I feel that this is a relatively cheap and effective way to sterilize foods (like meats) to prevent food born illness. Cobalt-60 has a half life of about 5 years, that's a lot of time to sanitize food. A lot cheaper than having to burn oil to heat things up.
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i don't know how i feel about this, yeah they say it is safe and that it kills bacteria and such and that it also might be cheaper and environmentally friendly but after so many years of ingesting this product will it have an affect on our body and how are the long term affects. I do think that it is good in a way because with all the new bacteria and illnesses that are showing up in our food now, that pasturization can't prevent and other forms of killing bacteria and food borne illness we now have a way to prevent them.
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