Sanet Post, Patricia Dines,
Re: About Food Irradiation -
January 21, 1997

Hi Dan,

>>Thanks for posting the E-Mail note you received.

You're welcome. Thanks for sharing the info you found out in return.

As to your points - I'm not an expert on irridiation, but the issues I see from my understanding of the issue are:

1. Not that the food becomes radioactive (don't know if it does or not) but that it becomes *changed*, modified in ways that we can't predict or control, perhaps at a level smaller than we're used to considering important, but perhaps still at a level important for life.

   I'm skeptical to think that anything could so effectively kill all the kinds of living organisms you mention in your quote and leave the main living organism there, the food, unchanged. I don't eat food because it looks like the food I want (ex. apple) but because I seek the vitality, the life force, in it. Perhaps irradiated food has such an extended shelf life because it's now missing some important component of life force. I think it's arrogant to believe that we know enough about life force - something we don't really study, in this materially-oriented world - that we can just brush aside this real likelihood.

2. The second issue I have with it is choice and thus full labelling. I eat my food for life force. I don't want someone taking that away without my being able to make a choice about it. (Even with labelling, it's not perfect, because one still wants to eat in restaurants and other people's homes once in a while...)

3. The third is that I don't buy that it's necessary to take this risk, or that the highest levels of necessity are being applied before taking this risk. My understanding is that it's commonly used "just in case." In other cases, I consider it highly likely that it's used to cover up food that shouldn't be shipped/eaten in the first place. If the food is so infested, perhaps not eating it is the smart response - not just getting rid of what infested it (and a bunch of other things as well). Perhaps the infestation indicates something not well about the food. Just like I think pesticides are sometimes used to prop up plants that haven't been nourished, instead of nourishing them properly.

>>I for one would much rather be able to buy fresh tropical fruits on the
>>mainland that are free of tropical fruit fly eggs and other insects than
>>take a chance on even one of them getting through.

Or, one can eat local, because that's the food with the highest vitality, rather than having to kill food to ship it long distances!

Hope these thoughts are useful -

P. Dines