A long standing meme in the German anti-nuclear scene is how you can't eat mushrooms from German forests, as they're tainted by cesium-137, decades after the Chernobyl disaster. What are the facts?

Yes, there is a slight uptake of it in mushrooms. But you would need to eat amounts roughly similar to the amount of mushrooms an entire supermarket has, to get a dose of up to the level of normal background radiation in Germany. Or eat at least 2 kg to get the radiation exposure of a flight and return from Frankfurt/Main to New York City.

This is for the most radioactive parts of German mushrooms.

The legal level for food is at a level of if you eat only this for an entire year, then you will accumulate a dose of half the background radiation of the Ore Mountains (in German 'Erzgebirge') or Bavarian Forest (German: 'Bayerischer Wald'). Which would be an accumulated dose of 1.6 times the national average and 1/25th of the known threshold for observable radiation effects (cancer chance increase by 2 percent points compared to natural cancer risks).

In other words: German mushrooms are harmless from a radiation exposure standpoint, the regulation around it is just overly cautious.

Source below.

#Radiation #Germany #Radiophobia #Chernobyl

https://www.bfs.de/DE/themen/ion/umwelt/lebensmittel/pilze-wildbret/pilze-wildbret.html