What do these two sanitizing techniques have in common? For starters, they have both been demonized by not-so-friendly folks and have thus left the drawing board as practical uses to preventing the spread of harmful pathogens.
The FDA uses a good analogy to explain why irradiating food is not a bad thing:
Irradiation does not make foods radioactive, just as an airport luggage scanner does not make luggage radioactive. Nor does it cause harmful chemical changes. The process may cause a small loss of nutrients but no more so than with other processing methods such as cooking, canning, or heat pasteurization. Federal rules require irradiated foods to be labeled as such to distinguish them from non-irradiated foods.
The EPA notes that through this relatively safe and inexpensive process, bacteria and other microbes are killed off — thus preventing illness and food spoilage.
An interesting tie-in comes with recent research that indicates that “[v]accines made with bacteria killed with gamma irradiation” may be more effective than traditional accepted methods which use heat and chemical inactivation.