In The Future

The future ‘aint what it used to be.

In The Future header image 2
← →

The future of scary tomatoes …

June 10th, 2008 · 295 Comments

Have you heard of anyone falling ill from any infected tomatoes? Yet all over the country, tomatoes are being pulled from restaurants and shelves. Why?

Is salmonella really a problem? Compared with say, 100 years ago, isn’t salmonella barely a shadow of the problem it once was?

Even during last year’s spinach scare, how many people really got sick from salmonella spinach compared to say, the same number of people in the same time frame who died from cardiac arrest and lung disorders brought about by air pollution?

Here’s what’s really happening …

These ‘scares’ in the interest of public health will continue over the next few years to get the grocery-buying public to view vegetables and fruit as a source of potential danger. That way, when the FDA decides to allow irradiation of all produce (in the interest of public health) the outcry will be somewhat easier to contain. Currently, produce shipped from other countries is sometimes irradiated (i.e. mangoes from India, see this link).

But if the nuclear industry has its way, all produce from a single cherry to an avocado to a stalk of celery will be irradiated as a means of avoiding fumigation and controlling salmonella, among other things.

Now, why would the nuclear industry want to irradiate my apple? Because it’s a profitable coproduct for something that would otherwise be a liability. Take some of the most lethal, dangerous toxic waste from your local power plant or nuclear weapons program (like Cesium 137) and rather than have to pay millions to contain it through most of its 30-year half-lives, you now have people wanting to buy the stuff from you for their local food processing factory. In a single stroke, toxic nuclear waste becomes a “valuable coproduct.”

And as otherwise intelligent Americans are now advocating the increase of nuclear power as an environmentally-sustainable power source, something will need to be done with all of this waste, since nobody has yet figured out what to do with all of the nuclear waste that has been piling up since the 1950s. Bingo! Turn it into something that industry wants to buy, and let THEM take the responsibility of safely disposing it. What could be better? If some ends up in the local landfill rather than buried thousands of feet deep in a secured salt-cavern, well c’est la vie, right? At least its better than having some terrorist get hold of the same waste and making a dirty bomb out of it.

The future of nuclear waste, as the DOE and the nuclear industry sees it is bright. (No pun intended.) They see a whole industry for nuclear waste, as it replaces all of the chemicals that we once used for killing things like germs, mold, bacteria and fruit flies. Mosquitoes bugging you? Here, hang some of this low-level nuclear waste above your garden party. Cheese got moldy after only three weeks in your fridge? No problem, this new irradiated cheese will last for twenty-three years as long as the protective sheath is not opened. Did that pint of strawberries you just bought two weeks ago go moldy before you could eat them? Future strawberries taste the same, but last for twelve months as long as the protective sheath is not opened.

And all of our studies have shown that irradiated produce is identical to non-irradiated food … err, that is, as long as you don’t look at it with a microscope and see that the irradiated cells look like a street scene from the Andromeda Strain, and the non-irradiated food still has actual, living cells, that for some annoying reason seem to do particularly well in humans that are also composed of living cells.

But we’ve solved that problem too. And we have found that the consumption of irradiated food is 100% safe! (That is, as long as it is consumed by someone who is no longer living.)

Tags: Articles

295 responses so far ↓

Leave a Comment