Nothing. Then we got politicians...

Good Luck Brother!! The best advice I can provide is to ignore the internal organs. Just about everything everywhere has been contaminated by something in someway.

When you are hungry, that will be one of the last things that you will worry about.

When you are sufficiently hungry, rats look delicious and even cockroaches start looking good.

So we got Trouble, right here in the river city, etc....

I bring the original question back to the floor: where in the United States can you count on harvesting clean wild food?

Is "nowhere" the offcial, consensus answer?

Is there someone who knows better who is willing to share the good news?

Thanks.

Maybe in Alaska and Canada???

Back to my original answer, go talk to hunters. They are the ones in any given area that can answer this for you.

Who cares what food can be harvested in Florida, Ohio or any place else if you are in California? Learn what you can harvest & eat where you are, not where you are not.


Hunters & fishermen will have the answer to this, talk to them, find them at local gun shops and outdoor shops like Cabalas and Bass Pro Shop.

BobS - I do talk to hunters and fishermen. Even the quiet and successful ones do not know if what they bring home is safe to eat long term. No one is sending samples out to be tested.

They just firgure that it didn't seem to hurt their daddy, has not seemed to hurt them yet, etc.

I do know of a few cases of discussed on a kayak fishing board by those who claim to be victims of mercury poisoning, and there are stories in the worldwide news of some such cases as well.

Most states will list, in their hunting and fishing regulation books, what the weekly ingestion recommendation limits are for various rivers, bayous, lakes, etc.

I've not seen anything in the regs about land types of game, though.

I think you said you live in SF if so and you have a sail boat I would think it would be easy to get out into the ocean far enough to get fish that you could feel comfortable about eating.

But nothing in life is guaranteed. I don’t see a problem eating animals you shoot (I don’t like fish) I don’t see a lot of news stories (like none) of hunters falling over dead from eating wild animals they shot.

You seem to want someone to give you a piece of paper saying it’s safe to eat animals or fish from X-location. Never going to happen!

It seems you are asking an Un answerable question as you want a black & white answer to a gray question.

It's not the dropping dead from eating; it's the developing who-knows-what over time and then dropping dead.

I have read there are studies of small mammals and of roe deer in Europe that have found elevated levels of mercury, and in the U.S. the mammals that eat from marine-based foodchains (killer whales and polar bears, for example) have also been found with elevated mercury that is suspected as a cause of reproductive problems and death. Wasn't there a ban on lead shot in part because of environmental contamination that was finding its way into waterfowl?

My question is just, does anybody know where this stuff is likely to be less of a problem?

Guarantees I do not expect but, yes, I would love it if some responsible expert published a study saying the animals in this part of the US were tested and found to have a low incidence of various pollutants in their systems. Wouldn't you?

"...a study saying the animals in this part of the US were tested and found to have a low incidence of various pollutants in their systems..."


If that were to happen, I suspect that those critters would be wiped out in short order, laws and regs notwithstanding. You would not be the only person to want to go there. Either they get killed off, or the population, and therefore the polution, would increase, causing the same old problem...