Trego's Mountain Ear

The wild boars in Europe don’t glow in the dark – but they’re too radioactive to eat.  It isn’t because of Chernobyl – it’s because of the pigs diet and the atmospheric bomb testing that occurred in my youth.  The whole story is at Nuclear weapons tests blamed for radioactive European boar

The interesting excerpts (shamelessly added to encourage readers to click the above link and read the whole thing) are:

“Scientists have found that wild boar in the forests of Germany and Austria are so radioactive that they are unsafe to eat and have discovered that this is not because of the Chernobyl disaster, as was previously assumed.

Researchers from the Vienna University of Technology have concluded that testing of nuclear weapons in the decades immediately after the Second World War is still affecting the soil in areas where the boar live in Germany.”

The kicker is that the radioactivity from the bomb tests dropped onto the soil, has became part of the soil, and is incorporated into the mushrooms that grow there:

“The key to this phenomenon is underground mushrooms, the deer truffles. [They are] eaten only or mostly by boars, not by other animals. [It is] caused by the slow migration of caesium through soil and it takes time for the caesium to reach the truffles, hence the time delay.

“Contamination from both sources have been taken up by the wild boars’ food, such as underground truffles, contributing to their persistent radioactivity.”

Truffle samples showed that 88 per cent were above the levels of radioactive caesium deemed safe in food, which would be bad news for the boars. However, it has protected them from humans.”

Apparently, hunting wild boars has dropped in popularity.  The radioactivity adds a new dimension to the words ‘hot pork sandwich.’