Food irradiation is a process by which foods are zapped with a sudden burst of radiation that kills microbes but leaves the food otherwise unaltered. It’s exactly the same process as pasteurization except that it uses radiation instead of heat, with the added benefit that it doesn’t alter the taste or nutritional content of the treated food. It leaves zero radiation in the food. The technique was first developed during WWII and during the next 20 years it was tested, retested and tested again for safety. They force fed generations of lab rats massively irradiated food and never found the least hint of problem. By the early ’60s at the latest, it was proven beyond all doubt that irradiation was a safe and highly effective means of preventing microbial contamination of food.

Despite this overwhelming scientific evidence, ever since the mid-1960s anti-nuclear leftists have demonized irradiation and created such anti-irradiation hysteria that for decades no politician could even think of allowing the irradiation of food, no matter how many lives it would have saved. Virtually everyone who has gotten sick from eggs, meat, vegetables, etc. in the last 40+ years has done so needlessly. The hundreds of immune-compromised people who die of salmonella every year didn’t have to die that way. All of the hundreds of people, many of them children, crippled or killed by E. Coli did not have to suffer. The people killed and maimed by contaminated leafy vegetable didn’t have to die.

We propose, if possible, to live in peace with all mankind; and after you have been convinced to your cost, that there is nothing to be got by attacking us, we have reason to hope that no other power will judge it prudent to quarrel with us… The weight, therefore, of an independent empire, which you seem certain of our inability to bear, will not be so great as you imagine; the expense of our civil government we have always borne, and can easily bear, because it is small. A virtuous and laborious people may be cheaply governed, determining, as we do, to have no offices of profit, nor any sinecures, or useless appointments, so common in ancient or corrupted states. We can govern ourselves a year for the sum you pay in a single department, for what one jobbing contractor, by the favor of a minister, can cheat you out of in a single article.