Somehow — it’s a puzzle to me — the heads of a number of essentially anti-capitalist, fantasy-land advocacy groups manage to live with themselves and the terrible human damage they do while simultaneously excoriating others, mainly corporations that have helped give this country an historically unmatchable standard of living.
Take, for instance, Joan Claybrook, who a while back was oozing indignation on PBS’ Lehrer “NewsHour” about the millions showered upon Washington lobbyists who then bribe our elected officials into making America miserable. “For 50 years, we haven’t had health care in this country because of lobbyists,” she fumed.
I myself had not noticed the absence of doctors, nurses, therapists, hospitals, surgery, drugs and public clinics over the past half-century, but Claybrook, in the hyperbolic, propagandistically worded way of many in D.C., was not aiming for literalism. She was actually bemoaning the absence of universal health insurance of the socialist kind that requires rationing of care to even the very ill in countries that have it.
Had she been more specific and concrete, maybe more viewers would have paused to consider that it wasn’t just some private interests opposing this cure worse than coverage problems that can be otherwise resolved, but common sense, analysis, basic economic understanding and alertness to what’s going on.
But then such qualities would be the death of the group Claybrook heads as president, an outfit called Public Citizen. Among its many public transgressions, it has opposed irradiation of food as a threat to public health when, in fact, irradiation is one of the surest means we now have to keep food safe to eat. It could be hugely useful in helping to prevent some future salmonella outbreak such as the one now occurring that has been primarily associated with tomatoes.
Claybrook herself has written that irradiation — which employs gamma rays to destroy bacteria and other sickening substances in food — is no “quick fix.” She spoke of fears it could disrupt the chemistry of vitamins or prove carcinogenic.
Other advocacy groups are also arguing against the technique. Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, warns that the latest salmonella outbreak has caused the “food irradiation industry” to see “dollar signs,” and warns that irradiation will merely cut costs and increase profits in the food industry, even though it is “expensive, impractical and ineffective.”
What garbage.
The irradiating technique has been around for decades without causing as much as a burp. Scientists of all stripes have pronounced it among the most effective, easily employed tools we have to fight food poisoning, with little expense, negligible consequence to taste or nutrition and absolutely no radioactive peril.
Those endorsing its use include the Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Scientific Committee of the European Union, the World Health Organization, the U.K. Institute of Food Science & Technology, the New England Journal of Medicine and the Institute of Food Technologists — not exactly a collection of outfits on the take from lobbyists.
The opposition here is not rational, but ideological, a peculiar combination of anti-modernist superstitions combined with a grotesque fear of a market mechanism that has done humankind uncountable times more good than all the enthusiasms of socialists put together: profits.
And though this opposition to irradiation is not the only reason it has not been used more widely, it has played a role, and it’s worth considering the human cost of not irradiating as much food as is now reasonable, quite probably hundreds of lives a year, according to various estimates, and maybe many more.
