<<Thanks for posting the E-Mail note you received.>>
You're welcome. Thanks for sharing the info you found out in return.
As to your points - I'm not an expert on irridiation, but the issues I see
from my understanding of the issue are:
1) Not that the food becomes radioactive (don't know if it does or not) but
that it becomes *changed*, modified in ways that we can't predict or
control, perhaps at a level smaller than we're used to considering
important, but perhaps still at a level important for life.
I'm skeptical to think that anything could so effectively kill all the
kinds of living organisms you mention in your quote and leave the main
living organism there, the food, unchanged. I don't eat food because it
looks like the food I want (ex. apple) but because I seek the vitality, the
life force, in it. Perhaps irradiated food has such an extended shelf life
because it's now missing some important component of life force. I think
it's arrogant to believe that we know enough about life force - something
we don't really study, in this materially-oriented world - that we can just
brush aside this real likelihood.
2) The second issue I have with it is choice and thus full labelling. I
eat my food for life force. I don't want someone taking that away without
my being able to make a choice about it. (Even with labelling, it's not
perfect, because one still wants to eat in restaurants and other people's
homes once in a while...)
3) The third is that I don't buy that it's necessary to take this risk, or
that the highest levels of necessity are being applied before taking this
risk. My understanding is that it's commonly used "just in case." In other
cases, I consider it highly likely that it's used to cover up food that
shouldn't be shipped/eaten in the first place. If the food is so infested,
perhaps not eating it is the smart response - not just getting rid of what
infested it (and a bunch of other things as well). Perhaps the infestation
indicates something not well about the food. Just like I think pesticides
are sometimes used to prop up plants that haven't been nourished, instead
of nourishing them properly.
<<I for one would much rather be able to buy fresh tropical fruits on the
mainland that are free of tropical fruit fly eggs and other insects than
take a chance on even one of them getting through.>>
Or, one can eat local, because that's the food with the highest vitality,
rather than having to kill food to ship it long distances!
Hope these thoughts are useful -
P. Dines