This is in answer to both your comments...which are quite comparable by the way, considering the different ends of the patch you are from!

The issues surrounding a potentially problematic technology like food irradiation via radio-isotopes are not amenable to procedural attack. Sure, there are ways both technical and administrative, by which safety can be insured, but none are foolproof, and the bigger the technology application becomes, and the more essential it becomes to our daily life, the chances increase for something to go wrong, either an honest error, or deliberate maliciousness.

Consider if this industry became part of our food handling landscape, thousands of these facilities would be scattered over the fifty states, and the companies, domestic and foreign, marketing the technology would be attempting to propagate it worldwide. Periodically, each of these facilities would require new radioactive sources, and need to dispose of the old ones. The stuff would be constantly in transit between the relatively few production and disposal sites and the thousands of irradiation facilities scattered about the farmlands. We can package it safely for transport, we do so now with medical sources, but now we are talking about hundred and thousand pound shielded containers, not the anonymous little packages of medical radio sources we now move through the mail. Do we slap warnings on the packaging to let handlers know to take care (and alert thieves and terrorists!). Or do we ship them anonymously for security, but run the risks they'll be carelessly misplaced or lost?

Who's going to inspect the irradiation facilities to make sure they are run safely? Who's going to certify the training facilities for the workers and vette them. Who is going to monitor that radio sources are properly made and then disposed of, and that they are used correctly? A crooked company could save money by using a source past its effective life--not a radioactive hazard, but an invitation for food to spoil and kill people the old-fashioned way.

Sure. it is technically possible to do this safely, but is this technology so important that it justifies the huge regulatory apparatus to properly manage it? And as TB loves to point out, regulatory agencies screw up big time by their very nature. And who will pay for this regulatory apparatus? The taxpayer? If the companies who benefit from this technology don't pay for it then the government is subsidizing them, we don't want that. But the companies will resist paying for their own regulatory and support infrastructure, just like they did with the nuclear power industry. Either we bite the bullet and shell out big government bucks to support this industry, or we tell the companies to pay their own bills--but we don't let them decide up front how much they need to spend. It will never work.

There are a lot of reasons nuclear power failed in the US, but believe me, (I was there!), the MAIN reason is that no one wanted to assume the financial responsibility of paying for the fuel recycling infrastructure. They bit the bullet in France, and in many other countries, and they have nukes. But they went the route of a big government bureaucracy. We don't like that here. If the utility companies had to pay for their own fuel recycling and disposal, nuclear power would suddenly become financially impossible.

We are technical people, scientist, engineers and technicians, and we tend to see these issues as technical problems with technical solutions. But we miss the big picture, the really big technologies (environmental management, air travel, nuclear power, space exploration, and so on) are social issues. They cannot be solved solely in the laboratory. They must be dealt with politically and economically, and they will always involve tradeoffs and compromises and risks.