April 1956: Preserve Your Meat and Produce With Atomic Radiation
This article originally appeared in the April 1956 issue of Popular Science. You can explore more of our archives--stretching back 140 years--here. "Put that hamburger back in the refrigerator before it spoils," my wife advised. "What're you doing, dreaming?" She had me there. After looking into something called radiation sterilization, I was absent-mindedly living in a world that we may all inhabit soon. It's one in which meat no longer spoils in a day or a week, bread won't mold, and fresh fruit and vegetables stay fresh. That's what's coming in atomic energy, they tell me. You take a pork chop, or a bunch of asparagus, and expose it for a few minutes or seconds to atomic radiation. It could be gamma rays from a reactor's spent fuel rods, or an electron beam from a high-voltage machine. The rays kill bacteria, mold, every living thing that makes food decay. So then, I told...