This seal get hooked up! Girls, food, safety... good times

The Food Safety and Economic Authority (ASAE) decided inspecting the Cathedral of Lisbon to check the hygiene conditions of the containers where the wine is stored and the hostije used in the celebration...

Dr Michael Hansen, a biologist with the major New York-based Consumers Union, says the media doesn’t talk about GM issues and there is more apathy in the US....“They just don’t realize the extent to which certain food such as corn or soybean are genetically engineered, and often they have not heard of any of these food safety concerns.”

European and U.S. food safety agencies have deemed cloned pigs and cows safe to eat. Should we all become vegetarians?

Another concern, expressed by non-governmental organizations such as Friends of the Earth and Oxfam, is that government-subsidized large-scale production of biofuels could increase food prices in developing countries. In a recent report by the International Food Policy Research Institute, Joachim von Braun writes:

Food irradiation is the process of exposing food to ionizing radiation in order to destroy microorganisms, bacteria, viruses, or insects that might be present in the food. Further applications include sprout inhibition, delay of ripening, increase of juice yield, and improvement of re-hydration. Irradiation is a more general term of deliberate exposure of materials to radiation to achieve a technical goal (in this context 'ionizing radiation' is implied). As such it is also used on non-food items, such as medical hardware, plastics, tubes for gas-pipelines, hoses for floor-heating, shrink-foils for food packaging, automobile parts, wires and cables (isolation), tires, and even gemstones. Compared to the amount of food irradiated, the volume of those every-day applications is huge but not noticed by the consumer.The genuine effect of processing food by ionizing radiation relates to damages to the DNA, the basic genetic information for life. Microorganisms can no longer proliferate and continue their malignant or pathogen activities. Spoilage causing micro-organisms cannot continue their activities. Insects do not survive or become incapable of proliferation. Plants cannot continue the natural ripening or aging process. All these effects are beneficial to the consumer and the food industry, likewise.It should be noted that the amount of energy imparted for effective food irradiation is low compared to cooking the same; even at a typical dose of 10 kGy most food, which is (with regard to warming) physically equivalent to water, would warm by only about 2.5 °C.The speciality of processing food by ionizing radiation is the fact, that the energy density per atomic transition is very high, it can cleave molecules and induce ionization (hence the name) which cannot be achieved by mere heating. This is the reason for new beneficial effects, however at the same time, for new concerns. The treatment of solid food by ionizing radiation can provide an effect similar to heat pasteurization of liquids, such as milk. However, the use of the term, cold pasteurization, to describe irradiated foods is controversial, because pasteurization and irradiation are fundamentally different processes, although the intended end results can in some cases be similar.Food irradiation is currently permitted by over 40 countries and volumes are estimated to exceed 500 000 metric tons annually world wide.