September 13, 2001
		Wisconsin, Florida Abandon Irradiated Meat More than 80 stores in Wisconsin and Florida that have participated in an eight month-long market test stopped selling the products, citing poor sales and low consumer interest. This has proven to be a spectacular failure for the irradiation industry which has sprung up in recent years to help protect meat-eating consumers from the rash of diseases that infect the U.S. meat supply due to unsanitary and poorly supervised conditions in the nation's slaughterhouses, and also to provide a convenient dumping ground for nuclear waste. Irradiation is a process that exposes meat to a dose of radiation equivalent to thousands of chest x-rays. This kills deadly salmonella, e-coli, listeria, and campylobacter viruses, though it also kills most of the nutritional value of the meat at the same time. In Florida, all six independently owned grocery stores and meat markets that started selling irradiated hamburger patties last year have since pulled the products from their shelves, according to store owners or employees contacted in the past week by the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen. One store owner told Public Citizen, "For us to carry an item, we actually have to sell the stuff... but it didn't sell. It was almost as though people didn't care." The nuked flesh fared no better in Wisconsin. The 80-store Pick 'n Save chain in Wisconsin has stopped selling irradiated hamburger patties. A Pick 'n Save spokesperson said that "there has been absolutely no consumer acceptance." The interest in the so-called 'safer' meat is virtually nonexistent in the Milwaukee area," despite last year's E. coli outbreak that killed a 3-year-old girl and sickened dozens of other people. Several states are still test marketing irradiated meats, including California, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota. Except for the Twin Cities, sales are predominantly occurring in rural areas. Additionally, major retailers Wal-Mart and Publix have backed out of deals to sell a Florida meat packer's irradiated ground beef, according to an official from the meat-packing company, Colorado Boxed Beef. And despite claims of increased sales, the stock price of a major California irradiation company has fallen by more than 50 percent since May. "Consumers are voting with their dollars," said Wenonah Hauter, director of Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program. "Based on these early returns, irradiated food is losing by a landslide." The irradiation industry has made several attempts to gain consumer acceptance, most notably by pressuring the federal government to replace the term "irradiation" with the euphemistic phrase "cold pasteurization". The industry has recently opened a huge irradiation plant in the Chicago suburb of Schaumburg.