A How to Guide
Both Dr. Muranos left Iowa State University in 1995 to join the faculty of Texas A&M University, where they continued their work on food irradiation. In 1997, Elsa Murano was named Director of Food Safety at the University�s Institute for Food Science and Engineering. In May 2000, their colleague from Iowa State, Dr. Dennis G. Olson left academia to become Vice President for Product Application at Surebeam.
In June 2000, SureBeam announced that it had entered a strategic alliance with Texas A&M University, in exchange for donating $10 million of irradiation equipment over 10 years to the university, SureBeam would be given use of a university building for processing and for joint research. The Texas A&M team which negotiated the agreement with SureBeam was called the Project Bright Star Team, of which Elsa Murano served. In a trade publication Olson gushed about once again working with his former academic colleague and boasted that the research opportunities created were not just for food scientists but for sociologist as well. Project Bright Star member Mark McLellan told a trade publication that he thinks that an alliance such as that between Texas A&M and SureBeam are the way things are going to go in the future. �Companies are not going to simply write a university a 10-million dollar check. That kind of cash flow is very difficult to secure. It�s going to take this type of partnership agreement to get this scale of new industrial support in the future.�
According to the American Meat Institute Foundation, irradiated beef accounts for less than 5% of a 9 billion pound industry. The success of Project Bright Star was clearly contingent upon the ability to create a market for irradiated foods.
In June of 2001, Elsa Murnao was appointed to the National Advisory Committee for Meat and Poultry Inspection at the USDA. During the Committee�s June 2001 meeting Dr. Murano was interviewed by the Bush administration to serve as USDA�s Under Secretary for Food Safety. At that meeting, she approached several consumer representatives about their feelings regarding removing the prohibition on the use of irradiation for ground beef products purchased for the National School Lunch program. She was told not to start with the National School Lunch program because she would encounter major parental opposition. She was nominated by the Bush administration on July 10, 2001 and was eventually confirmed by the U.S. Senate on September 26, 2001.
In December 2001, her spouse, Dr. Peter Murano was appointed Deputy Administrator for Special Nutrition Programs at the USDA�s Food and Nutrition Services. In that capacity he is responsible for the child nutrition programs which the USDA administers, including the National School Lunch and National Breakfast Programs.
September 8, 2003 Food Chemical New reported that a former auditor raised question as to whether SureBeam Corp. inappropriately counted its provision of equipment to Texas A&M as revenue. Accounting questions continued to surface, placing SureBeam Corp., on the financial hot seat. As of September 2003, more than a half dozen class action suits had been brought against the company by investors. The paper also reported that the USDA would be giving Texas A&M University a one-year, $180,000 grant to start a National Center for Electron Beam Food Research, a rather awkward coincidence.
Public Citizen, a Washington based consumer group, submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to USDA asking for all information dealing with the grant. "We want the original grant request, all the records and all the correspondence leading up to the final agreement," said Tony Corbo, Public Citizen�s lobbyist. Similarly, Public Citizen has submitted a FOIA request to Texas A&M, asking for a copy of its original contract with SureBeam.