Japanese Food Safety

From the New York Times article, ‘Japanese Struggle to Protect Their Food Supply’:

The repeated failures have done more than raise concerns that some Japanese may have been exposed to unsafe levels of radiation in their food, as regrettable as that is. They have also had a corrosive effect on public confidence in the food-monitoring efforts, with a growing segment of the public and even many experts coming to believe that officials have understated or even covered up the true extent of the public health risk in order to limit both the economic damage and the size of potential compensation payments.

The Japanese government’s handling of food safety in the wake of the meltdown in Fukushima is like an inverted version of the boy who cried wolf. They’ve told us again and again that everything is okay, that they have the situation in hand, only to reveal later that perhaps things weren’t as okay as they thought but that now, for sure, things are okay.

Things are not okay.