Depending on dose and on whether the food is packaged to prevent recontamination, irradiation can retard spoilage, kill germs or even completely preserve. The World Health Organization, the American Medical Association and the American Veterinary Medical Association all endorse the process. The Food and Drug Administration has approved irradiation of pork, poultry, fruits, vegetables, spices and grains, although its use remains limited. Most imported spices are preserved with irradiation. Tropical fruits like mango and papaya from Hawaii are treated to kill exotic pests.
Irradiated chicken is served in hospitals in the Southeast.
Astronauts aboard the space shuttle eat irradiated food, including steak. Food irradiation would have prevented the illnesses caused recently by contaminated hamburger from Hudson Foods and the several deaths linked to Jack in the Box restaurants in the Northwest in 1993. Yet the new meat inspection system now being phased in by the United States Department of Agriculture does not even mention, much less mandate, irradiation. Neither Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman nor the Food and Drug Administration invoked food irradiation as asolution to the Hudson Foods situation, preferring instead to press for destruction of 25 million pounds of meat that could have been made edible with the technique. A petition for authorization to irradiate red meat has languished at the F.D.A. since 1994.