As someone predicted (and I literally can't remember who) the government's response to the recent reports of food borne illness is to propose irradiating more of the US food supply. Unlike Jonathan Adler (to whose post I link), I don't think you have to be some sort of anti-technology activist, or to be interested in passing disinformation, to be extremely wary of adulterating our food in yet another way that none of our peers would even consider to be a desirable outcome. To take my own concern over flavor for starts, the CDC's own booklet admits that , "Some treated foods may taste slightly different, just as pasteurized milk tastes slightly different from unpasteurized milk."

Of course, I'm quite sure irradiation would be effective in reducing E.coli. But so would eating nothing but gel caps filled with some sort of yet-to-be invented super food. Further, I'm fairly certain that there is some validity to the argument that the explosion of bizarre and socially crippling allergies in recent times has something to do with our over-cleanliness anyway. I can't imagine how massacring yet more bacteria, along with e.coli, would do anything but exacerbate that problem. We're already at a point where peanuts are almost verboten. Which foundational ingredient should we make our kids completely resistant to next?

Anyway, irradiation is a bad idea. If I could be sure that non-irradiated food would still be widely available, I wouldn't mind if some producers irradiated their cheaper food, and degraded living standard for animals further by taking advantage of the margin for error that irradiation provides. But that's not how the FDA behaves when it gets a bee in its bonnet. They command one thing, and ban the other. So if we're going to have non-irradiated foods and meats in the future, I rather suspect that now is when people ought to make their noise.

Currently buried under the press of editing my S.A.W. and getting it turned in, I have not yet read the books by Orhan Pamuk that sit on my bedroom bookshelf. However, his Nobel Lecture (reprinted in the New Yorker) was quite charming (link via Julian). Here is Pamuk on the writer's secret:

The writer’s secret is not inspiration—for it is never clear where that comes from—but stubbornness, endurance.

I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries . . . .