Radition & Dried Spices

Have you ever heard of irradiated spices? Well you should be aware of what that means, it means that when you open up your jar of cayenne pepper to spice some chili or sprinkle cinnamon from the jar to season some toast those spices have been treated with irradiation to kill bacteria and help extend the shelf life, this is becoming extremely important in this modern world.  Does this sound normal or ok to you?  This concept has been around for years and it concerns me.

Irradiation kills everything, I totally understand the premise, it sounds good the well being of human kind is being considered, right?  However, when the spices or food are irradiated it does not all just magically go away, basically we are ingesting carcinogens in small doses.  I am a fan of using spices in our diets for their medicinal powers, for example, using cinnamon to help with diabetes or using cayenne pepper to help with blood pressure, but when the spices are irradiated they lose some or all of this healing power.

No need to fret you can buy non-irradiated spices at many stores and online, and price wise you won't pay a whole lot more if any.  For example, I love dried basil and this year I had to buy some since we moved I did not get any dried this year.  I have been buying dried basil at Aldi, it has a wonderful smell and has been irradiated, it is a little over 1 oz and I pay $1.00.  Online at http://www.theherbarium.com/ I can get 1 oz of non-irradiated basil for $1.25 and its organic, this is a bulk website.  You could also try www.mortonbassett.com, some of their products are pictured below and they come in a nice jar you could reuse.  I am not a huge fan of buying organic because the prices can be high and sometimes hard to afford on a budget, but in this case it works out great.

When shopping for spices if it does not say non-irradiated you need to assume it is irradiated.  All spices that are non-irradiated it will say in pretty large print on the label or if they are organic they are always non irradiated.When we lived in Ohio we had to go to the local health food store to find these products.  I encourage you to give it a try!