[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?