A BEEF ON LABELING: IRRADIATED MEAT GETS A LABEL; BUT GM FOODS DO NOT

Health Canada is going to allow the beef industry to irradiate beef: to blast it with radiation. But it insists that such beef be clearly labeled so that “consumers wishing to purchase irradiated ground beef would easily be able to identify it on store shelves.” [i]

However there is no requirement to label genetically modified foods.  It is hard to understand why there is a requirement to label one but not the other, because they are similar in many respects. Here are the similarities:

Both Are Processes at the Molecular Level

Irradiation is a process, according to the Technical Summary[ii], that is applied to ground beef at the molecular level, the level of DNA.  The Updated Evaluation[iii] of irradiated beef states (at 5) that “The mechanism of action for microbial inactivation using ionizing radiation is understood to involve breakage of the chemical bonds in the microbe’s DNA by free radicals, which arrests microbial …Read More