FOOD AND SUPERSTITION

But there is at least one aspect in which radioactivity could vastly increase the world's food supply. As pointed out earlier (AtE Aug.77), much of the world's food meant for humans is wasted by rodents, insects and bacterial parasites; yet all of these can be killed by irradiation without affecting the food.

It would probably not be possible to do this in the US, where antinuclear propaganda has brainwashed people into associating radioactivity only with cancer (though it is used as therapy to care cancer), while they eat food sprayed with arsenic trioxide and spiced with the germs, bacteria and viruses of the most respected diseases.

But at least one country has had the guts to extend the storage time of some of its foods (and save energy for preserving them, too) by radioactive irradiation: South Africa, that continent's least racist country. Shown in the next column is Dr H.

Broderick, plant physiologist of the South African Nuclear Energy Board, displaying the difference between irradiated pawpaws (papayas) and those coming from what is utterly unknown to charlatans: the control experiment.

Irradiated potatoes, mangoes, pawpaws, strawberries, and chicken have been available in Pretoria and Johannesburg since last September and are presumably offered throughout the country now.

When it comes to superstitions about food, irradiation is as nothing compared with the bogeys artificially disseminated by the anti-scientific ideologists and eagerly exploited (often even legislated) by unscrupulous politicians. One of America's most articulate defenders of science against superstition in this field is biochemist Dr. Thomas H. Jukes, professor at the U. of California at Berkeley, who has mercilessly exposed politically motivated cancer hoaxes with DES and other substances while carcinogens in vegetables and other foods, where they are more prevalent, are being ignored. ("We may expect the FDA to ban DES in meat production, because this action will be a 'crowd pleaser' and because Sen. Edward Kennedy wants it. There is no scientific justifilcation for such a ban. . ."