---
title: "Food irradiation"
chunk: 1/6
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_irradiation"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:17:44.577399+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Food irradiation (sometimes called radurization in American English, and radurisation in British English) is the process of exposing food and food packaging to ionizing radiation, such as from gamma rays, x-rays, or electron beams. Food irradiation improves food safety and extends product shelf life (preservation) by effectively destroying organisms responsible for spoilage and foodborne illness, inhibits sprouting or ripening, and is a means of controlling insects and invasive pests.
In the United States, consumer perception of foods treated with irradiation is more negative than those processed by other means. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the World Health Organization (WHO), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) have performed studies that confirm irradiation to be safe. In order for a food to be irradiated in the U.S., the FDA will still require that the specific food be thoroughly tested for irradiation safety.
Food irradiation is permitted in over 60 countries, and about 500,000 metric tons of food are  processed annually worldwide. The regulations for how food is to be irradiated, as well as the foods allowed to be irradiated, vary greatly from country to country. In Austria, Germany, and many other countries of the European Union only dried herbs, spices, and seasonings can be processed with irradiation and only at a specific dose, while in Brazil all foods are allowed at any dose.

== Uses ==
Irradiation is used to reduce or eliminate pests and the risk of food-borne illnesses as well as prevent or slow spoilage and plant maturation or sprouting. Depending on the dose, some or all of the organisms, microorganisms, bacteria, and viruses present are destroyed, slowed, or rendered incapable of reproduction. When targeting bacteria, most foods are irradiated to significantly reduce the number of active microbes, not to sterilize all microbes in the product. Irradiation cannot return spoiled or over-ripe food to a fresh state. If this food was processed by irradiation, further spoilage would cease and ripening would slow, yet the irradiation would not destroy the toxins or repair the texture, color, or taste of the food.
Irradiation slows the speed at which enzymes change the food. By reducing or removing spoilage organisms and slowing ripening and sprouting (e.g. potato, onion, and garlic) irradiation is used to reduce the amount of food that goes bad between harvest and final use. Shelf-stable products are created by irradiating foods in sealed packages, as irradiation reduces chance of spoilage, the packaging prevents re-contamination of the final product. Foods that can tolerate the higher doses of radiation required to do so can be sterilized. This is useful for people at high risk of infection in hospitals as well as situations where proper food storage is not feasible, such as rations for astronauts.
Pests such as insects have been transported to new habitats through the trade in fresh produce and significantly affected agricultural production and the environment once they established themselves. To reduce this threat and enable trade across quarantine boundaries, food is irradiated using a technique called phytosanitary irradiation. Phytosanitary irradiation sterilizes the pests preventing breeding by treating the produce with low doses of irradiation (less than 1000 Gy). The higher doses required to destroy pests are not used due to either affecting the look or taste, or cannot be tolerated by fresh produce.

== Process ==

The target material is exposed an external source of radiation. The radiation source supplies energetic particles or electromagnetic waves. These particles or waves collide with material in the target.  The higher the likelihood of these collisions over a distance are, the lower the penetration depth of the irradiation process is as the energy is more quickly depleted.
These collisions break chemical bonds, creating short lived radicals (e.g. the hydroxyl radical, the hydrogen atom and solvated electrons). These radicals cause further chemical changes by bonding with and or stripping particles from nearby molecules. When collisions occur in cells, cell division is often suppressed, halting or slowing the processes that cause the food to mature.
When the process damages DNA or RNA, effective reproduction becomes unlikely halting the population growth of viruses and organisms. The distribution of the dose of radiation varies from the food surface and the interior as it is absorbed as it moves through food and depends on the energy and density of the food and the type of radiation used.

=== Better quality ===
Irradiation leaves a product with qualities (sensory and chemical) that are more similar to unprocessed food than any preservation method that can achieve a similar degree of preservation.

=== Not radioactive ===
Irradiated food does not become radioactive; only particle energies that are incapable of causing significant induced radioactivity are used for food irradiation. In the United States this limit is 4 mega electron volts (MEV) for electron beams and x-ray sources—cobalt-60 or caesium-137 sources are never energetic enough to induce radioactivity.  Particles below this energy can never be energetic enough to modify the nucleus of the targeted atom in the food, regardless of how many particles hit the target material, and so radioactivity can not be induced.