Nuclear Food

The goal was admirable but the means highly dubious. It sounds eerily familiar.

From Edible Geography...

Muriel formed the Atomic Gardening Society and even published a how-to-guide, Atomic Gardening, in order to “co-ordinate and safeguard the interests of ATOMIC MUTATION EXPERIMENTERS who would work as one body to help scientists produce more food more quickly for more people, and progress horticultural mutation.”

As Johnson explains, this interest in using nuclear radiation in plant breeding to induce helpful mutations “grew out of post-WWII efforts to use the colossal energy of the atom for peaceful pursuits in medicine, biology, and agriculture. ‘Gamma Gardens’ at national laboratories in the US as well as continental Europe and the USSR bombarded plants with radiation in hopes of producing mutated varieties of larger peanuts, disease resistant wheat, more sugary sugar maples, and African violets with three heads….”

Crazy huh? It gets worse...

As it turns out,far from being a fantastic fossil from the future that never was, along with jetpacks and flying cars, atomic gardening is alive and well today. According to a 2007 New York Times story, which quotes Dr. Pierre Lagoda, head of plant breeding and genetics at the International Atomic Energy Agency, radiation breeding is actually experiencing a renaissance, due to the introduction of “new methods that speed up the identification of mutants.”

What’s more, the Times adds, nearly 2,000 gamma radiation-induced mutant crop varieties have been registered around the world, including Calrose 76, a dwarf varietal that accounts for about half the rice grown in California, and the popular Star Ruby and Rio Red grapefruits, whose deep colour is a mutation produced through radiation breeding in the 1970s.