No GMOs? Have irradiated mutant veggies instead.

I think this must be a hallucination, Bags, surely no-one could use radiation in this way to produce actual predictably viable variations of plants? It sounds like using a hydrogen bomb to open a walnut.

Has the writer been reading about the treatment of perishable foodstuffs with radiation to kill off bacteria and give them a longer shelf-life, and written a Sensation Shocker as a result?

Have you searched for any solid info on this?

Quite elegran seeds have been irradiated by mutation causing rays from the sun for a long long time. Mutations are by their nature random. So extra radiation is just going to throw up more of the same. Don't like the style of this piece at all.

He goes on to say that this is happening because people are rejecting detailed GM modifications, so a more blunt instrument is being used with heavy applications of radiation. A bit like the theory that because traditional religion is out of fashion, people are turning to weirder beliefs, I suppose.

Irradiated vegetables and fruits have been around for some years now - they stay fresh a lot longer.

Do I detect irrational fear? GM foods are not evil or dangerous - merely more disease resistant for the most part. There is no such thing as 'natural' food in the shops - it has all been modified in one way or another over miilennia. Direct manipulation of the genome is just more efficient than selective breeding.

The fear is of the radiation. Telling people that there is none remaining in the treated food does not dispell that.

A century or so ago, radiation was "the" latest thing in medical advances, and was used for all kinds of things, some of them really weird and alternative.

Then came the realisation that it could have strange effects on the body, and then eventually came the bombs on Japan, with their terrible results and after-effects, and it became a bogeyman, killing maiming and distorting invisibly.

When food is irradiated for a longer shelf life, the radiation passes through, doing its job, and is gone before the food is on sale, but many people are still subconsciously remembering what that radiation could do, so they fear the food which has been treated with it. Hence all the jokes about glowing in the dark after eating radiated strawberries.

All those B movies about fiendish mutants taking over the world after a nuclear holocaust don't help.

A convoluted way to make an argument.