Can I safely eat whatever goes through the x-ray machine?

You might be surprised to know this, but you’ll get far more radiation exposure on the airplane than your food gets exposed to in the x-ray machine

As the diagram makes clear, walking through an airport security scanner exposes a person to about the same ionizing radiation dose as eating a banana. Flying from New York to Los Angeles exposes you to roughly the same amount of radiation you’d get from eight dental X-rays — and less than you’d get living in a stone house for a year. And those peanuts that airlines hand out? They’re a little radioactive, too.

"Radiation is one example of where people have such a wrong idea about what is dangerous, and are also unaware of its ubiquitous nature," says Barish. "Radiation is all around us. It is in us."

There’s this handy chart(referenced above) which shows that neither is particularly dangerous on a dosage scale. If you regularly fly on flights passing over the poles, you might need to be more concerned (but even then we’re talking LOTS of flights to get a concerning dose).

So eat up. There’s no danger from the x-ray machine.

x-rays are a form of light, just a frequency that your eye cannot see.

exposing food to xrays, in any amount, will not make the food radioactive, just like shining a very bright light on your food will not make it shine once you turn the light off.

Exposing food to fatal doses of EM radiation (like xrays) is how the US Department of Defense prepares its field rations. This technique has been extensively studied since the 60’s by academia and the military alike, and no adverse effects have been found.

Yes, you can safely eat food that’s been through the X-ray machine (assuming, of course, that it was safe to eat before going through the nuker).

There are two main ways in which something not previously radioactive (such as the food in your luggage) can be made radioactive by electromagnetic radiation (such as the X-rays probing your luggage): photodisintegration and photofission. Photodisintegration requires photons¹ with energies in the MeV (megaelectronvolt)² range, while X-ray luggage scanners use radiation "in the low-to-medium keV [kiloelectronvolt] energy range", a couple orders of magnitude feebler. Therefore, photodisintegration is not a concern here.³ As for photofission, it only occurs to any detectable degree for things that’re already prone to fissioning, so, unless you’re going to be eating something like plutonium or uranium-235, photofission shouldn’t affect your food either.

Conclusion: your food will not be any more radioactive when it comes out of the X-ray machine than it was when it went in.

¹: Photons are the basic units of electromagnetic radiation, such as visible light, X-rays, radio rays, ultraviolent rays, infrared rays, etc., etc., etc..

²: An electronvolt (eV) is a measure of energy; it is defined as the amount by which the energy of an electron changes when it moves through an electrical potential difference of one volt. A kiloelectronvolt (keV) equals one thousand electronvolts; a megaelectronvolt (MeV) equals one million electronvolts. The more (kilo-/mega-)electronvolts an X-ray photon has, the more energy it carries, and the more damage it can do with that energy.

³: Some specialised scanners for things like large cargo containers do use MeV-range X-rays, but that isn’t a concern for the food in your carry-on luggage.

There is

• radiation that can only heat,
• radiation that can additionally ionize,
• and radiation that can actually make stuff radioactive.

XRays are the second kind, ionizing radiation, meaning they may alter some molecules (i.e. the arrangement of atoms), but will not affect the atoms themselves(so no radioactivity is created).

The altering of molecules may also happen to the DNA molecule, which is why XRays are kept to a minimum. So the apple sent through the machine might get a mutation, but the chance of that being a problem to the apple are remote, and the mutated apple being a problem to you is virtually nonexistent. Sending old school films through an old school XRay might be a problem for the film (film is coated with molecules that are easily altered, because detecting (visible)radiation is it’s job, and old XRays used higher power sources).

Your association of XRay machines with radioactivity might come from the hazard sign above, that is sometimes quite prominently displayed on Xray machines.

It simply warns of ionizing radiation, which can, as stated, damage your DNA, thereby giving you cancer, etc, depending on strength. It’s popular meaning of “Danger! Radioactivity” came about because radioactive materials emit ionizing radiation (that’s actually why it’s called radioactive, the ionizing radiation messes with radio-equipment). So Radioactive materials emit ionizing radiation, but ionizing radiation does not produce radioactivity.

Is it safe to eat food, drink beverages, use medicine, or apply cosmetics if any of these products have gone through a cabinet x-ray system?

There are no known adverse effects from eating food, drinking beverages, using medicine, or applying cosmetics that have been irradiated by a cabinet x ray system used for security screening.

The radiation dose typically received by objects scanned by a cabinet x-ray system is 1 millirad or less. The average dose rate from background radiation is 360 millirad per year. The minimum dose used in food irradiation for food preservation or destruction of parasites or pathogens is 30,000 rad.

For more detailed information on radiation used for food inspection or food treatment, see Title 21 CFR 179, www.FoodSafety.gov, contact FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Nutrition, or contact the United States Department of Agriculture Food Safety Inspection Service.

Souce: The US Food and Drug Administration Home Page (see Question 8)