Radiation Paranoia in Canada: “We stopped buying fresh food from anywhere except the southern hemisphere”
ViewsHound has published an article about “Life for one coastal family after the Fukushima nuclear disaster.” Its author, Eva van Loon, describes how her family in Canada is overcome with fear of radiation. While some people in Japan are avoiding fruit and vegetables from the Fukushima area, the Loon family is refusing to trust any fresh food from the entire northern hemisphere.
I’d like to think that the article is satire meant to poke fun at paranoia about radiation, but the author appears to be serious:
Everyone, including the dog, has been on bottled water, kelp, and baking soda for two months. We laid in pre-disaster food after researching how best before dates are assigned for various parts of the food supply. We stopped buying fresh food from anywhere except the southern hemisphere (even eggs are pretty well past the safety date by now). The only dairy we buy is aged cheese. Fresh seafood, pork, beef, fowl – all pretty well done; we’re down to the freezer burn specials now. We had reduced processed food earlier; have now cut it out entirely because we can’t be sure what was used in its making, or when. We are going through a couple of kg’s of baking soda every week – the shower has never been so clean! We have stopped going to restaurants or if we do go, ingest only wine, which is still safe, and whatever food choices are probably pre-disaster. The dog has had to learn new commands, not to drink water outside (oddly, he prefers bottled water now and drinks from streams rarely, obeying the “No!” as if he already had that idea).
[...]
Why are we doing all this? Because we don’t know if we’re safe!
Baking soda is added to the dishwasher and to the laundry. Handwash is grateful for double sinks: one is the radiation sink, the other is the clean sink.
Why? Because we can’t find out the extent of our danger.
We will not plant a garden but will layer our fallow garden plot with baking soda to leach out the toxic minerals (although we don’t yet know if it works for plutonium) in hopes that by next year we’ll actually have a reliable radiation measurement tool. We will not be buying local produce, canning fruit, or picking blackberries. The bears will get everything this year, poor souls.
Call me one of the crazy sheeple, but I think the bears in Canada will be just fine.
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