Forest food testers: A measure of safety
From June 1st to the 3rd, Katy Spence and I took a side trip to Kawauchi Village, away from the main group. We traveled to the small town in Fukushima Prefecture situated roughly 20 km west of Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant. Katy was working on her Master’s project with me acting as her translator. Her story is about how radioactivity from the explosion at the power plant has affected the lives of forest communities where gathering wild plants and mushrooms has been a strong tradition. .
In Kawauchi Village, we met a group of Japanese medical students from Fukushima University. These med students and their teacher strong-armed us into having lunch with them (although we didn’t put up much of a fight), and then, after eating, they waited for us to finish our last interview before carting us away with them to one of the town’s four food testing labs.
These labs primarily test for two radioactive isotopes: Cesium-134 and Cesium-137. Although both pose risks to human health if consumed in large doses, the half-life of Cesium-134 is relatively short (only 2 years) and this contaminant is quickly working its way out of the food chain. Cesium-137, on the other hand, has a half-life of 30 years and dramatically accumulates up the food chain.
When testing food for the combined radioactivity from Cesium-134 and 137, anything less than 100 becquerels per kilogram or liter is deemed safe for consumption. At the lab, we saw several different foods get tested: honey, strawberries, and butterbur (the plant that Totoro from the Studio Ghibli movie “My Neighbor Totoro” carries as an umbrella).
Each had a different preparation method: The strawberries were rinsed and bagged; the honey (which was brought to the lab in a plastic water bottle) was poured into special testing bowl that had been lined with a plastic bag; and the butterbur was chopped in a blender and then firmly pressed into the same kind of plastic bag-lined bowl as the honey. The testing bowl was shaped roughly like the bottom of an old wine bottle but the top and base of the mound in the middle were right angles.
Just as there were different preparation requirements, there were different machines for testing the different kinds of foods. The liquids and finely chopped materials went into a small cylindrical machine whereas the strawberries were deposited into one that was boxier and had a larger capacity. Both machines functioned on the same principle: They measured the gamma spectrum of the food. Each test took half an hour.
The first two foods to be tested were the strawberries and the honey. The honey had 39 becquerels per liter and the strawberries were even lower with less than 7 becquerels per kilogram. Since both were deemed safe, Katy, the med students, and I were allowed to eat them. We tried to be courteous and eat the plain strawberries in a stately manner but, really, we were all eager for our next strawberry, drenched in home-cultivated honey.
When all the strawberries had been devoured, the lab staff made us all coffee so we could enjoy more of the honey. Coffee has always been too bitter for me to drink easily, and the Japanese make their coffee impressively bitter, so everyone laughed at me for how much honey I had to use to make my tiny cup drinkable.
The med students departed and Katy and I interviewed the the lab staff. Minoko Yamamoto, one of the food testers, told us even though she knew that the Cesium levels were high in the forests of Kawauchi in general, she would still gather and eat wild plants from specific locations that she had tested and knew were safe. She, more than anyone else, knew the health risks of ingesting too much Cesium but she still chose to carefully carry on practicing the traditions of her village.