BLACKSBURG -- There are few things more seductive than fresh raspberries glistening on the supermarket shelf, just waiting for a talented cook to turn them into sauce for chocolate ice cream or more often, for eating straight from the carton with a little whipped cream.

But in 1996, fresh raspberries from Guatemala contaminated with a parasite called cyclospora cayetanensis sickened 1,465 people in 20 states, the District of Columbia and two U.S. territories.

Cyclospora infection causes severe stomach cramps, explosive diarrhea and fever that can last from a few days to more than a month.

There are many ways to kill the parasites, viruses and bacteria that can lurk in the leaves of lettuce or the meaty folds of a fresh oyster. Unfortunately, most of them make the food look and taste bad.

But not so-called hydrostatic pressure pasteurization, a technique being tested by Virginia Tech food scientists.

In a little lab on Duck Pond Drive, food is immersed in water and squeezed at high pressures from a few seconds to a few minutes. The squeezing stuns or kills the disease-causing bugs, making the food safer.

Thanks to the quirky laws of physics, the pressure doesn't squish the food into an unappetizing mess. In fact, berries and oysters look no different after they're squeezed.

Angela Correa, spokeswoman for Tech's department of food science and technology, said recently that she won't eat raw oysters unless they've been treated in the school's high-pressure machine.

That was after she'd swallowed one of the quivering mollusks covered in hot sauce.

It had just been squeezed. There was only one noticeable difference between the squeezed oyster and the unsqueezed: After they're squeezed, they're much easier to pry open.

Raspberries sent through the machine for several seconds remained whole and actually tasted a little sweeter than the unsqueezed fruit.

Dr. Daniel Holliman, lead researcher at the Tech lab, is proud of the raspberry results.

He's pretty sure Tech will be the first of the 30 labs scattered across the world that are experimenting with high pressure to publish their work on raspberries.

As a physician, Holliman is also hopeful the high-pressure processing will help create new and better vaccines.

"There could be a lot of biomedical applications," he said.

Tech took a chance in opening its $1 million high-pressure lab. In fact, the department still owes about $400,000 to the state, food science professor George Flick said.

But Flick believes the technology will grow in popularity just as the organic foods industry has grown by about 20 percent each year since the late 1990s.

In 2003, the American organic market was worth about $10 billion, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

And high-pressure processing, unlike irradiation and chemical additives, uses only clean water and will likely appeal to people who value natural foods.

It's easier to find high-pressure pasteurized food on the West Coast, Correa said.

But several large food producers are already using it on their products, including Hormel and Perdue.