Gourmet Magazine: Food Safety Interview
I'm happy to report that I was interviewed by an excellent writer for Gourmet Magazine. I was impressed by Pervaiz Shallwani's balanced approach to a difficult topic. There are a lot of rumours but he managed to distill the facts and come up with a piece that pretty much sums up how I feel about things, post March 11, 2011. Wow, already 10 months ago...
Gourmet Magazine: Fukushima Fallout
Japan has a reputation for being on the forefront of food safety, having established stringent safeguards against mad cow disease after outbreaks in the 1990s, for example. But in the face of the unprecedented challenges Fukushima has presented, many Japanese found the early government response to be slow. It’s a viewpoint shared by Martin Frid, a Tokyo-based expert on Japanese food safety with the well-respected independent consumer watchdog group Consumers Union of Japan, which was critical of the government’s initial efforts.
“It took some time [to identify] where the plume of smoke had gone and what had been affected,” Frid says. “The government started testing, and the levels were not high. Outside of some river fish and some fluke places like some hot spots, the levels were below normal.”
(...)
Pinning down the long-term effects of nuclear disasters is tricky. “It seems no one really knows…how much and for how long radiation will be an issue,” ventures Boston University professor Corky White, an anthropologist who has written extensively on food culture in Japan. “I think the lesson has been that we need to test, we need to measure,” Frid maintains. “There is public testing and private testing, and there are independent groups like Greenpeace.” As confidence in the government has been strained, consumer groups and citizens have taken matters into their own hands, buying $625 dosimeters to test food themselves. Concerns about milk and school lunches have emboldened and mobilized mothers to test, Frid reports. “People have a right to be worried,” he allows.
There is more, make sure you read the rest. The (encouraging) ending goes like this:
Could Fukushima fallout—and related long-term health concerns—force Japan to fundamentally rethink the way it eats? “My guess is that it will not, that Japanese foodways will continue to be seen as healthy and important to preserve, and that the culinary mix will always contain the products and dishes of the regions of Japan,” [Boston University professor Corky] White maintains. “Fish have already begun to show lower levels of radiation effect, well below the safety ceilings.… What might happen, however, is a rise in interest in organic and sustainable farming—already a strong influence—which will set new patterns of cultivation.… I don’t want to paint too pretty a picture, but I see recovery of the ecosystem and maybe an enhanced new picture of farming in Japan in some relatively near future.”
Gourmet Magazine: The Future of Food
This week chefs, scientists, farmers, and trend-spotters are sharing a taste of how we’ll be eating tomorrow in our Future of Food Issue. Download the free Gourmet Live app for access to all of the issues and recipes, and visit Gourmet.com to read this week’s issue in full, including:
What We’ll be Eating in 2050 by Robert Sietsema
Airplane Food of the Future by Janice Wald Henderson
The Culinary Impact of the 1964 World’s Fair by Casey Barber
10 Questions for Mark Stevenson by Megan O. Steintrager
Fukushima Fallout by Pervaiz ShallwaniYou can also read more articles about Japan and food by Corky White
over at The Atlantic.
Comments