How do the potatoes in that sack keep from sprouting on their long trip from the field to the produce section? Why don’t the apples spoil? To an extent, the answer lies in varying amounts of irradiation. Though it sounds awful, irradiation reduces microbial contamination, which improves shelf life. Most people can choose to take it or leave it, but in some countries, they aren’t overly concerned about the irradiation dosages found in, say, animal feed. So where does that leave non-vegetarians?
If that line of thinking makes you want to Hulk out, you’re not alone. [kutluhan_aktar] decided to build an IoT food irradiation detector in an effort to help small businesses make educated choices about the feed they give to their animals. The device predicts irradiation dosage level using a combination of the food’s weight, color, and emitted ionizing radiation after being exposed to sunlight for an appreciable amount of time. Using this information, [kutluhan_aktar] trained a neural network running on a Beetle ESP32-C3 to detect the dosage and display relevant info on a transparent OLED screen. Primarily, the device predicts whether the dosage falls into the Regulated, Unsafe, or just plain Hazardous category.
[kutluhan_aktar] lets this baby loose on some uncooked pasta in the short demo video after the break. The macaroni is spread across a load cell to detect the weight, while [kutluhan_aktar] uses a handheld sensor to determine the color.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen AI on the Hackaday menu. Remember when we tried those AI-created recipes?
The premise for this project is incorrect – food irradiation does not induce radioactivity in food! The claims that irradiated food is potentially dangerous is also very misleading. A Geiger counter is only going to detect the ambient radiation and what is naturally present in the item of food.
Including the naturally-occurring, gamma ray-emitting Potassium-40, which we have in our own bodies.
I agree that irradiation is usually performed at low-enough doses (and not with neutrons) that activation isn’t a concern. But if there are radioisotopes present in the fertilizer, that can carry on into the food. An example is Polonium-210 used in fertilizer for growing tobacco, which ends up becoming an internal alpha dose source for smokers.
The Po-210 is not intentionally added to the fertilizer, it is naturally occurring in the rock that the fertilizer is made from. And at this point if you are still smoking with all the publicly known risks that’s on you.
Oh OK, good point on both counts.
I do not care how high of a dose of Gamma you give it will not make the target radioactive. It might burn it to a crisp but it will not make it radioactive. Only neutron can activate elements.
So no this whole thing is a large amount of Ecco bunk. Right up with vaccines causing autism.
And yes if the food has any potassium in it then it will be radioactive. Since we need to potassium to live you better have some of it in your food.
Truth is radiation is a natural part of our environment. It is only when we add a whole lot extra into the environment does it become a problem.
Dont forger the radioactive building in taiwan where some Co-60 accidently got mixed in when they melted down scrap. Studies of the residents of building have actually found lower rates of cancer.
https://blog.xkcd.com/2011/03/19/radiation-chart/
I mean, you can always eat one banana or get less from sleeping next to someone if you want to count ionizing radiation.
I can’t believe Randall missed the most relatable entry on that chart…Spock’s dosage in The Wrath of Kahn.
Yah, at best this sounds like something from KickStarter that one would find in a debunking video.
At worst it’s a good way to eliminate Potassium from your diet.
I guess if your life goal is to ring a church bell….
Even after reading the entire article I’m not sure how this is supposed to give a meaningful result. Materials that have been irradiated with gamma rays do not emit any more radiation than they did beforehand.
Using sunlight on produce as an analog to gamma rays seems problematic as it will cause changes in colour and moisture content that gamma rays do not. The amount of time needed to get even a small amount of radation dose from sunlight will drastically alter the characteristics of the produce in ways that would not occur from a gamma source.
“Though it sounds awful,”
No, not really, and the whole project is pretty much junk science.
Color? Only relevant from product of the same batch. One additional egg yolk in the pasta could change the color.
Radiation? Gammas do not activate and “leave” radiation like neutrons. They just pass right through. There are a lot of naturally occurring isotopes in out food that give off detectable radiation like K40.
Weight? Without knowing volume what’s the point? Same species of apple could have different densities based on when they were picked and the amount of water they had.
Using sunlight as an analog for hard gamma irradiation is also going to wildly skew the results. Sunlight effects colour a lot more than gamma rays do even at a tiny fraction of the dose rate.
“Junk science” defines it.
Gamma(10MeV and higher) do activate stuff – but it isn’t that easy to measure(small quantities of short lived radionuclides).
Thing is that food etc. is irridiated with a Co-60(1,25MeV) or – historically – cesium 137(only .662MeV), so much less than required for so called “photonuclear reaction”.
Could you direct me to a reference where I could learn more about gamma activation?
The effect of Photonuclear Reaction, which 12L14 mentioned, is also called Photodisintegration and Phototransmutation. It’s how lightning creates Nitrogen-13, and how Iron decays into Helium in supernovae. This would knock loose a proton, neutron or alpha particle, and could turn a stable isotope into a radioactive one.
A very similar process is called Photofission, where gamma rays cause a fissile element to undergo fission. I’m pretty sure that’s not gonna happen in relevant amounts in an apple.
Thanks for the terminology, I found some articles by following those terms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photodisintegration
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photofission
Found there that the two common sources for irridation, cobalt 60 and cesium 137, don’t have sufficient energy to photodisintegrate even the most sensitive elements and photfission has quite the tiny cross section.
If you beleive this tech, I have some Theranos stock to sell you.
HA!
There’s irradiation to reduce spoilage, and then there’s radioactive stuff in the food.
Irradiation uses souces of ionizing radiation. This will not leave your food radioactive , it just kills it (and nearly all bacteria) dead.
Radioactive material in your food is a different problem altogether. That’s bad. If the feed is contaminated, then the meat (or other animal products) that you eat will be radioactive.
Are you dealing with irradiation or contamination?
Who cares. Serious question.
Well that lady sells me wild mushrooms from Chernobyl says they’re safe but now I can make sure!
Well the geiger isn’t registering much above background, but there’s that funny almond smell…
Generic geiger is useless for beta (mostly, depending on sensor) or alpha particles.
Most glass geiger tubes are sensitive to beta. If you want alpha sensitivity you need a good mica end windowed tube.
Yeah, this is definitely a nonsense project. Nothing about that write up makes any sense at all.
I have an ethical problem with the project. It’s one thing to make a movie prop that blinks lights and displays “DANGER – RADIATION”. It’s another thing to use that prop to scare people. But it’s another thing entirely to use it to scare people into making poor decisions that will negatively impact their health.
Even if it worked as described (which is doubtful for numerous reasons) this project may result in people declining to obtain food that has been disinfected by irradiation, causing them to get a perfectly avoidable case of salmonella (or other food-borne disease.) Worse, they may put at-risk people in harm’s way by serving tainted food.
If you’re going to continue to carry stories of such projects, at least tag them as “pseudoscience”, “holistic”, “religious”, or other appropriate terms to let readers know clearly that they’re dealing with a deceitful product.
This.
Linked papers have very little to do with the supposed tech.
And then there is that radioactive city in Northern Iran, where some residents receive over 10 times the “maximum acceptable ” amount of radiation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar,_Iran
Well… why aren’t we tryna sign them up as the first Martians? :-D
“The radioactivity is due to the local geology. Underground water dissolves radium in uraniferous igneous rock and carries it to the surface through at least nine known hot springs.”
Man, when they say hot springs they ain’t kidding!
Though it sounds awful
I think maybe you should broaden your horizons, and try to make feel less immediately negative about things that are new.
That’s the extra confusing thing about that statement, this isn’t new! I’m in my 40s and I remember reading about irradiating food as a preservative in like middle school and according to wikipedia, it wasn’t a new process then! (the first commercially sold irradiated food was in 1958 but the idea dates back about half a century).
And did you help your kids to understand that? I wonder what the problem could be?
… it should be regulated strictly to avoid any health risks and nutritional value drops.
Sounds like a tobacco company coming after ecigs. Any clue what all the plastic packaging this guy is supporting does to the food? How about that food being simply unavailable to lower classes. What is the healte cost of the refrigerants we use?
This seems more like harmful misinformation and FUD than helpful technology.
Same vibe as warning readers against hand sanitizers containing toxic and dangerous chemicals such as methylcarbinol.
“Radiation” by itself doesn’t mean anything bad, in this very moment you’re deliberately exposing yourself to the radiation emitted by your smartphone’s or computer’s display.
Ionizing radiation would be bad if it was hitting your DNA or creating a considerable amount of radioactive isotopes. Using UV to sterilize food does neither.
Oh, and there’s also a specific frequency of UV that can’t penetrate your skin’s dead cells, so a properly filtered UV lamp would be reasonably safe even for direct exposure (In all likelyhood, much safer than sunlight), although it might also be less effective for food disinfection.
One last thing: the photons of red light emitted by a candle carry around a billion times the specific energy of those emitted by 5G, so the only way 5G can hurt you is if you stick your head right next to a powerful emitter – which would literally just be the equivalent of sticking your head in a microwave and turning it on. I’m saying this just in case you’re also one of *those* people.
Where did you read that about the energy level of 5g?
Clearly somewhere wrong, because, worst case, it’s only a ten million or so, not a billion (7 mm wavelength vs 700 nm)
So they also don’t eat or drink anything that has been boiled, cooked or baked because people would die in such high temperatures?
Anyone else notice that the apple was p’shopped in?
Usually irradiation of food sources is done by multiple exposures to a Co-60 source or a similar radioisotope, and while it can, and absolutely will, kill you if you get too close, it leaves no trace and will not harm you in any way when eating the fruit that was irradiated, the cellular damage caused by the ionizing radiation is no more dangerous to you than the cellular damage that occurs when you cook vegetables and meat with thermal radiation since the item being irradiated and cooked is already dead, unlike the microbes and parasites that may be on it, the goal is to make them as dead as the item being irradiated.
Detecting something like Cs-137 in your food would make more sense, if you are in an area that may have a leaky nuclear power plant, or in case of nuclear war, as that would be very bad to ingest, but outside of that use this project serves no purpose at all.
Saying that a fruit is dead the moment it is picked raised some interesting questions about what it means to be dead, or alive.
In this instance, my personal distinction between alive and dead would be that the organism, either as a whole or its organs are able to sustain normal functions, once the stem is cut from a plant it is potentially in a state between being dead and being regrown from the seeds there may be in it, what made it the original fruit will eventually decay away and it will cease to exist in the form that defined it as a fruit, so while the normal function of the fruit is to decay away to make way for the seeds, it is also dead, I guess it becomes a problem for Schrodinger at this point.
Someone needs to build an air cannon to fire these so called Irradiated Quantum Fruit through a couple of slits to get to the bottom of this! Am reasonably sure that’s how all of this works…
If nothing else we will have developed a highly scientific way of creating fruit salad.
New low Kristina and HaD.
I don’t remember that I read pseudo-science article on HaD in 10-12 years.
I don’t see any chromatohraphy column or big coils:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.radmeas.2011.05.008
Why slag the people who work hard to bring you the content that you enjoy? Looks like the people commenting know lots about this, which is great, and I’m sure that Kristina (and me too) knows more about the subject now than before. Maybe she didn’t know it was pseudoscience. I certainly didn’t.
I’m still thankful that I get to come to HaD an read interesting articles.
I would love to see irradiated food on sale in the UK, think of the waste it could save – and waste saved is carbon not burnt, what’s not to like except for unfounded fears surrounding the word “radiation”?
Prove it is unsafe, and I will happily change my mind :-)
Also, while I am on it, fears around nuclear power are half of why we’re so dependent on Russian gas…
Just change “Radiation” to “It’s Atomic!”
The Atoms for Peas initiative.
Is it not? This has been around since the first half of last century.
I may be thinking of old regulations on reflection, e.g.:
https://www.iatp.org/news/uk-watchdog-reveals-illegal-irradiation-of-some-foods
But now see:
https://www.food.gov.uk/safety-hygiene/irradiated-food (2021)
Mainly looking it up again because you asked…
Given how prices for all sorts are shooting up these days, I wonder if consumer resistance would be lower if it meant that a product were cheaper?
The link below has a list of URL’s to methods of detecting if food stuff is irradiated by ionizing radiation.
https://ec.europa.eu/food/safety/biological-safety/food-irradiation/legislation_en
Like, if it is currently being irradiated… Right now? Is this reallyan issue in the food processing places where the food is irradiated?
The whole thing is wrong on so many levels. The type of radiation you use to sterilize things does not make them radioactive or dangerous. The rest of it really doesn’t need to be explained why it’s wrong. To me it almost feels somebody with a bit of knowledge is using it to trick those with none. Disappointing
This is junk sience – and unworthy of hackaday. Kristina : Please put a disclaimer at the top of the article warning that this is basically just blinkenlights with a fantasy story to accompany it. Unless they are using neutrons to irradiate the food (which nobody does, and why would they) there will be no radioactivity added to the items. Ionizing radiaton does just that – ionize, i.e mess with the electrons around the core. To make something radioactive, it would have to mess with the core. Neutrons do that, depending on speed. Nobody uses neutron sources to irradiate food, it would be much more expensive than beta/ gamma irradiation, and have no added bonus. — As a cherry on top, the authors seems to put all ionizing radiation in one bin, which is ludicrous. Please, please amend.
Shame on Hackaday for spreading this sort of quackery. What next, home homeopathy articles?
Hackada,y please delete this pseudoscience BS.
I agree with a lot of people, this is BS and should not be published/featured, especially in this world of FUD we are already living in. Delete please.
For reference, here are the EU approved tests to analyse irradiated food:
https://ec.europa.eu/food/safety/biological-safety/food-irradiation/legislation_en
This me there was one lesson here:
Don’t bother reading anything Kristina Panos wrote, it’s probably lies and half truths anyway.
HAD – Please don’t delete this article. Definitely add a disclaimer but there is a LOT of good info in this comment section.
“predicts irradiation dosage level using a combination of the food’s weight, color, and emitted ionizing radiation after being exposed to sunlight” This is typical “garbage in, garbage out” of the sort that we should expect from any attempt to use a neural network to predict results based on flawed underlying assumptions.