From its early discovery period around the turn of the century to the mid#x2010;1950s, food irradiation research and development and patenting proceeded quietly in the centers and laboratories of Europe, North America, the USSR and elsewhere, essentially unbeknownst to the general public. The development caught the attention of the news media, food faddists, and others concerned about chemicals added to foods and, ultimately, a sufficient number of Congressmen in the United States during the 1957#x2013;58 period to cause the process to be included as a food additive in the 1958 Food Additives Amendment to the U.S. Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. This action contributed to the cancellation of a planned joint U.S. government#x2010;industry food irradiator, which was to be the first such semi#x2010;industrial scale facility. The action also contributed to what has become a pattern of disruptions and setbacks instead of what might have been the orderly progression of the new food process from laboratory research, development, and wholesomeness testing to pre industrial pilot scale evaluation of the technical and economic feasibility of promising applications, to dispassionate and objective regulatory evaluation of safety and efficacy through to regulatory clearance and prudent industrialization according to sound business practices. Instead, at critical times in its protracted and tortuous passage from being a novel curiosity to becoming merely another bona fide, legitimate food processing/preservation/treatment method, it has had the burden of being a #x201C;reluctant food additive for all agendas#x201D; thrust upon it by types ranging from overzealous promoters to the most strident and persistent hard#x2010;core opponents, the latter largely drawn together from the #x201C;health/natural#x201D; food, #x201C;organic#x201D; farming/gardening, environmentalist, and antinuclear everything persuasions. Meanwhile, also essentially unbeknownst to the general public, a nonfood radiation processing industry has been steadily growing and flourishing over the last quarter century, ironically safely and effectively employing essentially the same technology/process (e.g., to sterilize health care and related products to prevent infections) that becomes so exploited and misrepresented, and therefore emotion#x2010;arousing and controversial, when associated with food. It cannot be overemphasized that those who choose to ignore the overwhelming weight of an unprecedented body of scientific data, information, and knowledgeable, competent, objective professional judgment to the contrary so as to continue to loosely speculate about the safety/whole#x2010;someness of irradiated foods in an uncompromisingly extreme, negatively biased manner areobligedto produce plausible mechanism(s) whereby stable compounds capable of exerting toxicological manifestations in consumers, or other public health#x2010;threatening effects, might be brought about by the radiation processing/preservation/treatment of foods according to well#x2010;established conditions and procedures. That even the most severe, persistent antagonists are unable to do so, because such mechanisms are for all practical purposes nonexistent (i.e., scientific evidence bears out what theory would predict), is evidenced by their having to resort to intellectually bankrupt, transparently fabricated smear campaigns to serve their true agendas at the expense of the process and the public that they purport to defend and protect.
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