Despite world‐wide severe underreporting of food‐transmitted disease of microbial origin, it is clear that the majority of such diseases is caused by enteropathogenic Enterobacteriaceae. Most of these are spread by foods of animal origin, consumed raw, or recontaminated subsequent to industrial or culinary heat processing. Radicidation with the help of gamma rays of carcasses or consumer size cuts presents a real solution to this problem. An ecologically based procedure for the estimation of the most probable effective dose for the elimination of enteric pathogens of bacterial origin from fresh meats, poultry and seafoods is described, special attention being paid to bacteriological analytical methodology found useful under conditions of practice. An additional advantage of this approach is, that it will allow easy assessment of lower doses, following reductions of initial enterobacterial loads, which should be attempted in parallel. It is demonstrated that most alleged counter‐indications so far hampering the use of ionizing radiation in food processing have now been eliminated, allowing full advantage to be derived from radicidation as an essential contribution to the protection of the consumer against diseases of microbial aetiology spread by foods, similar to the mandatory pasteurization of milk.