My well was shut down by the EPA and is on the super fund list.
How 'bout you?

That would be....ummmm....nowhere.

The question I have is if wild foods are contaminated, why wouldn't cultivated foods, which exist in the same environment, not suffer the same way?

Fish is a great example. Here in PA we have many warnings NOT to eat too much (more than a serving a month) of any fish caught in any body of water. So Trout, which is farm raised and released into the wild, isn't a meal choice for regular eating. Wild Greens? Too toxic (they say) but why is this the case when the farm next to the place where I pick wild greens sells their food as "safe" .

Not all 'toxic' wildlife is our fault. Mercury content of fish can be naturally occuring.

Generally top food chain critters end up collecting the toxins that are in all the stuff they eat which is why shark fin soup has so much mercury in it and polar bears are considered so toxic.

A note on that though 'toxic' doesn't always mean 'poison'. One of the most toxic things to eat in a polar bear is it's liver. Most automatically assume that it's because that's where all the blood toxins are collected from the toxic critters it's been eating...but that's not the case. A polar bears liver will kill you because it has more Vitamin A than your body can handle due to it's diet of seals and such which also have a very high Vitamin A content (eating Seal liver is also not recommended from what I know).

Can we blame humanity on that? Some will try but I think we need to be a little smarter before we start pointing fingers.

[quote=martinfocazio
The question I have is if wild foods are contaminated, why wouldn't cultivated foods, which exist in the same environment, not suffer the same way?
[/quote]

That is exactly right: they are. So the the question: where is a cleaner environment?

Here in California cultivated crops generally are washed with relatively clean water to remove surface contaminants, are usually irrigated with as-yet unpolluted groundwater, and historically come from more rural areas where there is supposed to be less general exposure to things like air-borne and traffic-generated pollutants. But all those "protections" are breaking down as population grows, aquifers are exhausted or polluted, etc..

As a gross over-generalization, in much of California wild plants and critters live in drainage areas adjacent to cultivated land where pollution concentrates. Upland game and plants living in up-wind environments are therefore likely to have a somewhat lesser pollution "load."

It is also true that plants generally have low levels of contaminants so if your diet is plant-based your exposure is considered low even in the long term. Going organic further reduces plant exposure to stuff we don't want. But even if exposure is inevitable, what can you do to have the least exposure?

The stuff in and on plants that we don't want (PCBs, cadmium, mecury, and a witches brew of other stuff) does accumulate as plant eaters eat more plants (survive), especially in fatty tissue and some organs. When plant eaters are predated and those parts of the body are eaten, that "load" is taken on by the tissues of the predator. Over time, and as you go up the food chain, that stuff gets concentrated in apex predators in the same body areas.

It appears that if an apex predator loses fat/weight it absorbs the chemical load into the rest of its body. This large dose is what has effectively "poisoned" orcas, polar bears, and others - including humans - the base of whose food chain is based largely on wild plant eaters who live in a contaminated / polluted environment.

And of course you add to your personal "load" by eating processed foods that contain an alphabet soup of chemical additives. FDA-approved or not, no one really knows the long-term effects of any of this stuff, or the combination of all this stuff. However, few think it can be good.

So, eating unprocessed foods from low on the food chain from a clean environment would be good. Eating young critters from a clean environment that have had less time to accumulate bad stuff is good. Eating only lean meat from such critters, broiled to lessen fat, makes sense.

Assuming all that to be at least likely, then where are the cleaner environments in the United States?

I'd guess the cleaner environments are generally the places farthest from large populations of people and industry. I've heard that the 200 miles surrounding Dayton, Ohio is the most densely populated area of it's size in the US. Each of the ocean coasts are densely populated also. I suspect those areas also have higher than average contamination of soil and water.

Here in the midwest, we have high levels of mercury in the water from all of the coal we burn for electricity. Lots of agricultural run-off around here, too. Still, you can eat alot of bluegills before you need to worry about health effects from eating the fish. Even the little bit of pollution you ingest from eating small fish and game is probably offset by avoiding many of the additives/herbicides/growth hormones, etc. found in commercially processed foods. I don't like eating chemicals any more than you do, but I'm not going to worry a whole lot about it either. Hopefully something else will kill me before environmental pollution makes me sick.

I doubt there's anywhere that pollution hasn't effected to some degree. But the farther you get from the factories and cities I suspect you'll find the pollutants to be less concentrated.

Finding uncontaminated places to use as they stand would be difficult. Upcountry: mine tailings chemical residue, left over from a hundred years or more: arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, chromium, copper, lead, nickel, zinc. In farming country: chemical fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides. From down-country water sources, every chemical and combination known.

About the only kinds of places I can think might be less contaminated are old, worn-out farms that haven't been in use for a long time, lightly-grazed and minimally medicated herbivore pastures, and natural rock cisterns that collect rainwater. And the places that fit even those criteria won't be easy to find.

I'm living on one acre of high ground that doesn't flood with contaminated water, has never been used for mining and isn't below one, and was only used as cattle pasture for many years. Unfortunately, one of the three previous owners tended to use at least part of it as a dump. If I had a well, a complete test of the water would probably be very interesting, as I'm mostly surrounded by farming country.

And the further east one goes, the longer the population has been there, contaminating the area one way or another. Something as 'simple' as the previous half-century site of a livery stable will still be contaminating the water supply with nitrates for maybe another century or two.

It was a nice country for a while.

Sue

White Man came to the country and found:

Braves spent all of their time hunting and fishing,
Squaws spent all of their time with the work,
There were NO taxes,

And white man thought he could improve on a system like that!!

wildman--read "1490" for the true scoop..good--bad--ugly..

I'm having a problem figuring out what is wrong with this????????