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From: The AGRIBUSINESS EXAMINER

Issue # 79 June 22, 2000
Monitoring Corporate Agribusiness From a Public Interest Perspective
A.V. Krebs Editor\Publisher

TITAN CORP.TO IRRADIATE BRAZILIAN BEEF, LAUNCHES MEDIA "PASTEURIZATION" PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGN

In a move critics see as the first step to importing more beef raised on cleared Brazilian forest land, Titan Corporation's SureBeam Corp. subsidiary, which currently irradiates meat in its Sioux City, Iowa plant, has joined with a Brazilian company to build a network of irradiation facilities in that South American country.

SureBeam will hold up to a 50% equity interest and will share in recurring revenue with Tech Ion Industrial Brazil S.A., based in Manaus, Brazil. The joint venture will be called SureBeam-Brazil.

In recent weeks, frozen hamburger patties --- processed for Huisken Meats of Chandler, Minnesota --- irradiated at the Titan's Sioux City facility --- including IBP Inc, the nation's largest meat packer --- have signed agreements to irradiate meat at the Sioux City plant. At Titan's facility, meat is zapped with electrons fired nearly to the speed of light-nearly 300,000 miles-per-second-from a linear accelerator (not unlike the one Titan developed for President Reagan's ill-fated Star Wars missile-defense program).

Meanwhile, the several U.S. large companies that produce and market irradiated beef have launched a campaign in the media, which critics say, is using misleading phrases like "electronic pasteurization" and "cold pasteurization" about irradiation. These companies have also succeeded in distinguishing "e-beam" irradiation from gamma ray irradiation-making the former sound more innocuous than the latter-when each type of technology poses precisely the same health risks to people who eat food that's been "treated" with radiation.

Leading this campaign is the Titan Corporation, an erstwhile defense contractor. Titan's public relations material characterizes e-beam technology as safer and cleaner than gamma ray irradiation, which relies on decaying radioactive sources such as cobalt-60 and cesium-137. True, e-beam irradiators do not use radioactive material or generate radioactive waste, but their damaging effects on food are indistinguishable from those caused by gamma rays.

The Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy Project points out that food "irradiated by either process is deficient in vitamins and other nutrients, has caused serious health problems in laboratory animals, tastes and smells worse, is bereft of beneficial microorganisms that keep botulism and other potential deadly maladies at bay, may contain carcinogens and mysterious chemical compounds, and-in the case of meat-may still be tainted with feces, urine, pus and vomit resulting from filthy slaughterhouse practices.

"Facile comparisons," the Project claims, "of e-beam irradiators to such everyday products as TV's and microwave ovens are so much hokum. Yes, television sets use streams of electrons to generate the pictures you see. But it would take 1.4 billion TV's to generate the amount of radiation generated when meat is `treated' by an e-beam accelerator.

"What's more, e-beam irradiators can actually make food radioactive, if only briefly. And this can happen at levels as low as one-third of the level at which meat is "treated" by Titan and other e-beam irradiators. This form of electromagnetic radiation is called Bremsstrahlung, which occurs when an electron gets so close to the nucleus of an atom that the nuclear charge creates a sudden change in the electron's path," they add.

While it is against federal law not to label irradiated food as such, companies such as Titan and Huisken have been permitted, according to the Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy Project, by media organizations to blur the facts about the irradiation process and its harmful effects onour food supply. "For the sake of consumers, the misinformation campaign should be put to an end," they urge.

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