I thought of this old slapstick routine when I heard that the US Department of Agriculture has recently ruled that the giant meat packers can now start irradiating the raw beef, pork, and lamb they sell to us. Each package of meat gets hit with the radiation equivalent of up to 70 million x-rays that you get in your doctors office. It doesn't make the meat radioactive, but it does shrink the nutritional value, alter the taste, kill the beneficial bacteria that meat provides, destroy vitamins A, B1, and E, and create new chemicals in the meat that might be cancer-causing.
Irradiation also raises the price by about a nickel a pound.
Our families are the industry's guinea pigs. But what they don't want you to know is that this gross contamination is the direct result of the disease-causing factory feedlots that cattle are now subjected to and by the sloppy practices and filthy facilities of the meat packers themselves. If the industry would simply clean up its own act and stop contaminating the meat, there would be no need to make the problem worse by further contaminating the meat through irradiation.