Why irradiate food products? Approximately 25% of all food products are lost after harvesting due to insects, vermin, and spoilage. Currently, a significant number of chemicals are used on food products for preserving/preventing insect losses. In roots and tubers, sprouting can be a major cause of losses. In developing countries where handling, transportation, and storage conditions are less ad...

Ionizing radiation has been widely used in industrial processes, especially in the sterilization of medicals, pharmaceuticals, cosmetic products, and in food processing. Similar to other techniques of food processing, irradiation can induce certain alterations that can modify both the chemical composition and the nutritional value of foods. These changes depend on the food composition, the irra...

Issues as relevant to wide scale application of food irradiation are presented in this paper to provide current status of the technology. Global development on key issues such as public acceptance, public health improvement, safety and wholesomeness, regulatory aspects, potential application of the technology to ease quarantine problems in the trade of food and agricultural commodities as a via...

Kansas State University Agricultural Experiment Station and Cooperative Extension Service Food irradiation is one means of enhancing the safety of food. Food irradiation can be applied to treat numerous problems in the food supply: insect infestation of cereal grains, sprouting of potatoes, rapid ripening of fruits and vegetables, and bacterial growth in meat. This food preservation method is n...

volatile compounds generated from two types of polymeric laminated films, irradiated by gamma radiation at 8, 10 and 15 kgy, were investigated. activated carbon was used as a dry food simulant to trace the migrating compounds by gas chromatography/mass spectroscopy (gc/ms). the resulting data showed that the polyethylene terephthalate (pet)/polyethylene terephthalate (pet)/linear low density po...

About a quarter of the world's food production is lost after harvesting, even though a number of food preservation methods are readily available. Losses occur especially in the tropical regions where most developing countries are situated: perhaps because the available food preservation technologies do not function efficiently in such environments, or because they do not lend themselves to the ...

January-April 1997 33 I nsufficiently cooked ground beef was identified as the cause of a 1993 outbreak of Escherichia coli O157:H7 illness in the Western United States when four children died and over 700 people became ill. The magnitude and media coverage of this and other recent foodborne illness outbreaks have helped elevate public awareness of foodborne microbial pathogens. The food indust...