How’s this for a juxtaposition? This is from the front-page of the Washington Post online:
Severe hunger combined with radioactive food is a bad combination:
The weekend also brought a new, if inevitable, report of radiation contamination in the nation’s food supply. It was found in milk 20 miles from the nuclear plant and even farther away, about 60 miles, in spinach collected on half a dozen farms, according to the Associated Press. Traces of radioactive iodine also were discovered in tap water in Tokyo and other cities.
Officials urged calm, saying the detected amounts of radiation are not harmful. Edano said that further tests would be conducted and that the government would ban the sale of any contaminated food products. “Human beings are exposed to a certain level of radiation in daily life. Please react calmly,” Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s office wrote on its Twitter account after the Saturday news conference.
But milk is a particularly sensitive issue when radiation fears arise. After the Chernobyl nuclear accident in Ukraine in 1986, cows fed on contaminated grass and produced milk that was blamed for 6,000 thyroid cancer cases, mostly among people who were children at the time of the accident.
Eight days after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake sent a merciless wall of water crashing onto Japan’s northeastern coast, a city [Sendai] once noted for its jazz festival and expansive joie de vivre is reduced to foraging for basic necessities.
The descent of a vibrant metropolis toward a state of simple survival has helped numb the population to a further agony. Many here are too preoccupied with day-to-day needs to focus on unseen dangers leaking from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant down the coast.
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