Mushrooms and radiation

October 26, 2012

Yoroku: Mushrooms remind humans of dangers they brought on themselves

http://mainichi.jp/english/english/perspectives/news/20121026p2a00m0na004000c.html

Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud is said to have taken a hat with him whenever he went on walks in the nearby woods with his family. Whenever he spotted a porcini or another type of mushroom, he would quickly throw his hat on it and declare, "That one's mine!"

Though Freud was an avid mushroom picker, his wife is said to have preferred buying mushrooms from the store, lacking confidence in her husband's ability to distinguish the edible ones from the poisonous. Surely there's nothing as troublesome as a careless mushroom-picking enthusiast.

The radiation contamination of Austrian mushrooms attracted attention following the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the former Soviet Union. A quarter of a century later, radiation is no longer detected in much of the agricultural products that were initially affected by the disaster, except for in wild mushrooms, in which relatively high concentrations of radioactive cesium are still found.

In Japan, many people enjoy going mushroom picking in the mountains in autumn. But according to media reports, radioactive cesium levels above the national permissible limit have been found in gypsy mushrooms and weeping milk caps in several municipalities in eastern Japan. Such municipalities, as a result, have imposed voluntary bans on the distribution and sale of wild mushrooms.

According to Makoto Ogawa's book "Kinoko no Oshie" (The teachings of mushrooms), mushrooms' tendency to absorb cesium had attracted attention in Europe since the 1960s. The ones that grow from the ground are the most absorbent, serving to circulate the radioactive cesium on the soil surface and confine it inside the forests for a long time.

The radioactive substances that have made their way into the forests look like they'll be sticking around for a while. Meanwhile, mushrooms kindly alert us to the dangers of radiation contamination that humankind has wrought.