Irradiated ground beef's popularity isn't sizzling

Consumers haven't been buying the meat that's zapped to kill E. coli, so it's not being sold in most supermarkets anymore.

By PHILIP BRASHER
REGISTER WASHINGTON BUREAU
June 15, 2004

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Washington, D.C. - A device set up in Sioux City several years ago was supposed to be the future of safe food. The equipment could zap ground beef with an electron beam to destroy deadly E. coli bacteria, rendering burger meat safe for the most vulnerable child or elderly person. The Sioux City facility, set up in the heart of one of the nation's largest beef-processing regions, was designed to process up to 250 million pounds of food annually.

But consumers have shown little enthusiasm for irradiated food, and now the company that manufactured the equipment, the SureBeam Corp., is bankrupt and the Sioux City facility is closed.

Irradiated beef has all but disappeared from the nation's supermarkets this year.

"I don't think it is dead because there are still irradiation processors which are turning out product," said Tony Corbo, a critic of food irradiation with the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. "But I believe that the market for it is very small unless there is a mandate to serve it in government- sponsored nutrition programs."

SureBeam's bankruptcy was not the only setback for the irradiation business.

After the anthrax attacks in 2001, the U.S. Postal Service rushed to find a way to sterilize the mail and make it safe and decided to buy eight of the SureBeam machines for $40 million. There was one problem: They couldn't do the job. The Postal Service recently disclosed that it has given all eight machines away to a university and other government agencies.

The machines could not kill anthrax quickly enough to accommodate the line speeds the Postal Service needed. SureBeam's parent company, San Diego-based defense contractor Titan Corp., gave the Postal Service a new, more powerful machine, but it has not yet been installed.

"It's easy to sit back afterward and look at this with 20-20 hindsight. When congressmen, senators and newspapers were all getting anthrax-laced letters, what they wanted was a solution," said Titan spokesman Wil Williams.

Many food-safety experts still hold out hope that irradiation will be widely used on food.

It has "the potential to decrease the incidence of foodborne disease dramatically," according to a recent paper in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that irradiation could stop 900,000 illnesses and 352 deaths if half the nation's meat and poultry were treated.

The U.S. Agriculture Department approved the irradiation of beef in 2000.

SureBeam was the biggest irradiator of beef products, treating about 15 million pounds a year, before filing for bankruptcy in January after investors accused the company of misstating its earnings.

A Florida company, Food Technology Services, continues to irradiate beef using radioactive cobalt rather than the electron-beam technology that many grocers believe is easier to sell to consumers.

"We still believe the potential is there," said Ruth Mitchell, a spokeswoman for Hy-Vee Inc. of West Des Moines. Hy-Vee started selling SureBeam-treated meat in 2002, but it was never more than a tiny percentage of the chain's beef sales. "The companies are reluctant to build the facilities until they know there is a market for the product, and we can't build a market for that product until we have a product available," Mitchell said.

The irradiation industry, with assistance from U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Ia., has pushed the government to allow irradiated products to be labeled with the term "cold pasteurization."

"I think it is very appropriate and long overdue that this term 'pasteurization' be broadly applied to represent the destruction of harmful bacteria," said Christine Bruhn, director of the Center for Consumer Research at the University of California-Davis.

The 2002 farm bill required the USDA to offer irradiated beef to schools, but so far, none has asked for it.

There is still at least one place that Iowa consumers can get irradiated burgers if they don't mind the price: Omaha Steaks started trucking frozen ground beef to Florida to have its meat irradiated by Food Technology Services after the Sioux City plant closed.

The mail-order burgers cost about $5 a pound.