Are Your Organic Greens Getting Irradiated?

If you want to look like Demi Moore, you've got to eat a lot of raw foods like she does to get there. But no one wants to get E. coli or Salmonella in exchange for being healthy and trying to eat more leafy greens, like spinach and lettuce. Food-borne illnesses, especially in raw foods — like the tainted spinach scare in 2006 that killed five people and sickened over 200 others from E. coli — have given rise to new methods of dealing with contamination. One of those methods is the controversial use of irradiation, which the FDA recently approved for the food industry.

So what is irradiation? It's a preservation process that uses ionizing radiation from machine sources. The goal is to reduce disease-causing organisms in foods by disrupting their molecular structure and killing harmful bacteria and parasites, but the problem is, this method also destroys some nutrients and can create "unique radiolytic products" that haven't been tested for safety. So it seems a little like trading one bad thing for something else that's potentially bad — though the FDA says it isn't. Dr. Laura Tarantino, director of the Office of Food Additive Safety at the FDA., told the New York Times that "the agency had found no serious nutritional or safety changes associated with irradiation of spinach or lettuce."

But still, the Organic Trade Association released a statement on the subject saying "that the long-term effects of irradiation are still unknown. Studies to date show that irradiation can result in the creation of toxic free radicals, vitamin and nutrient loss, and the formation of carcinogenic chemicals."

Sounds scary, but there is an upside to all of this — you don't have to worry whether or not irradiating organic food makes them any less organic because as Barbara Haumann, of The Organic Trade Association, tells Sprig, "irradiation has never been allowed in organic food production." Under the U.S. National Organic Program, irradiation is not allowed now and won't be allowed in the future, so if you're not crazy about the thought of your produce getting zapped — regardless of the FDA's claims that it's not harmful — stick with organics. That way, the only "unique products" on your salad will be the ones you toss in.