Did you know that the mint flavour in your chewing gum, and the ruby-red grapefruit on your breakfast plate, both come from cultivars created through a deliberate irradiation? I'd never heard of this before, but apparently in the 50's and 60's many countries set up "gamma gardens" to experiment with exposing food plants to powerful gamma radiation, with the hope of spontaneously creating new cultivars with beneficial mutations. The disease resistant properties of commercially-grown mint, and the colour of the "Rio Star" grapefruit grown widely in Texas, were "created" using this method.
