Japanese given little clarity about origin of vegetables when trying to avoid radioactivity

[flamingdem]

http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/

** I don't doubt that we will be equally fooled about radioactivity in food in the U$A
*** US Japanese restaurants are claiming that they "test" but that is BS considering a meaningful test costs $1000

---- SNIP


One of my contacts in Tokyo says you can't always buy vegetables of a single origin. The sign says the vegetable was grown and harvested in "either Hokkaido or Chiba", or "either Kanagawa or Chiba". If you're lucky, you get the vegetables grown in the safe areas like Hokkaido. If you're sort of lucky, you get the vegetables grown in the relatively safe areas like Kanagawa. Otherwise, trust your government and be happy.

Scanning the tweets in Japanese, another trick that JA (Japan Agricultural Cooperative Association) apparently does is to label the vegetables as grown and harvested in "Hokkaido and other locations", "Kagoshima and other locations", etc. "Other locations" can be anywhere.

People in Japan, particularly in Tohoku and Kanto, weren't told of the huge release of radioactive materials on March 12 after the Reactor 1 building exploded. They weren't told of the even bigger release of radioactive materials with explosions on March 14 and 15. They were told about them after one month, when it was just way too late for any preventive action that they could have taken.

And now they're given hardly any choice in not consuming food that is potentially contaminated with radioactive materials. They are told that they are harming the farmers by listening to the baseless rumors and not buying the vegetables.

[jpak]

1. The Japanese electorate needs to throw these bums out - they are rolling the dice with their lives

unfucking believable

[flamingdem]

2. It's criminal, especially to pregnant women and children

and I'm wondering if they have an alternative press or why they didn't get the information from the papers or TV. NHK is covering it but what I saw was after the explosions.

[SpoonFed]

3. and farmers are killing themselves.

I mentioned that his is coming from a friend of mine talking with an Agro food buyer, both of whom live in Japan (Osaka). Add these and the future cancer deaths to the zero death toll figure that the nukelovers are discounting as the true cost of this preventable disaster.

But hey, the must be farmers affected by the tsnuami and not the alpha/beta/gamma emitting particles, right?

[FBaggins]

5. Where are "farmers killing themselves"?

Why not "add" thousands more imaginary deaths if that's what it takes to prove your nonexistant point?

[Name removed]

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[kristopher]

4. There are 130 million people there requiring food.

Not being snarky or argumentative here - what could they do differently?

Japan is largely self sufficient in food-stuffs so most of what they eat is from Japan.
They do not have a great deal of surplus food production capacity so while they can feed themselves, there are limits to shifting the production burden to other areas.

They have told people in detail how to clean the food as well as can be done and they have stopped agriculture in areas where non-washable contamination has been identified. (And no, I don't think the process behind this is clear, therefore I also consider the effort suspect.)

I understand every criticism being leveled against the government, but I don't know what they could do to be *significantly* more effective at this point. I'm sure that the government response could be improved, but anything they do differently is going to have consequences (such as not having enough food).
For example, if they start a large scale effort to import food it is going to take a considerable amount of time to establish and make operational a system that can feed 130 million people. In the meantime, what happens?

My personal view of this is that they are in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" set of circumstances. The primary problem was believing that the dangers of nuclear fission are able to be measured by traditional cost/benefit and probabilistic risk assessment. The mistake of the leadership was to not consider the depth and total ripple effect of a failure - to grossly underestimate the cultural price that a worst case accident could exact.

In all it is just a royal cluster-fuck.