In the Danger Zone

by Stefan Gates

Oddly enough, there's lots of beer available for him to drink, and his mum doesn't mind him necking that, but he isn't interested. Ukrainians see beer as a soft drink.

  'Do you worry about radioactivity in food?' I ask. None of them does. Hyena's elderly friend Nadia says that they appreciate the lifestyle in Slavutych – it's better than most towns in Ukraine because there's good healthcare and housing, and if the food is contaminated with a little radiation, it's a small price to pay.

  This astounds me, but everyone agrees with her. Denis and his mate couldn't care less; it's as though he's never thought about it. 'Nothing's happened yet,' he says.

  His mother explains, 'Why are we so tolerant? We have another reason. It feeds us. They built this town and we live here only because of the Chernobyl power plant.'

  Nadia tells me about the day of the accident: she had to battle with the authorities to keep custody of her kids because a bus driver had gone off with their ID documents. She had gone to her dacha (a cross between a country cottage and an allotment shed that many Ukrainians own) with a friend but they suddenly started getting terrible headaches and raced home to Pripyat to see the tragedy unfolding. She cries as she remembers everything she lost.

  Yuri – a wonderful, smiling bear of a man – cooks huge pork kebabs marinated in his top-secret recipe (which he readily reveals after a couple of vodkas: soak the pork in a mixture of vodka, dill, basil, parsley and onions). The pork's a little raw, but I reason that you can't grill away radiation-like germs, and anyway, it tastes great.

  Anatoly talks about his experiences as a liquidator. He says that Ukraine has been vilified as a polluter of the world, but in fact, the Ukrainian people were the heroes who gave their lives to stop the disaster getting any worse and killing millions more.

  Magic Mushrooms

  The mayor of Slavutych has agreed to take me out for the day. Trouble is, all he's really interested in is getting the BBC to film his horse at a local stable, whilst all I want to do, given we're slap bang in the middle of the season, is go mushroom picking. Mushrooms are one of the foods that absorb radioactive particles most readily and foraging is hugely important to Ukrainians. I want to see if the land around Chernobyl really is as safe as the authorities claim, but the mayor isn't ready to play ball.

  The mayor is a tall, imposing, balding fellow of 60 and he's been in charge for 15 years. He is relatively popular, although there are dark mutterings about him spending a lot of time shaking hands, and precious little improving the lot of the townsfolk. After watching his horse trotting around the stables for hours on end, I finally manage to drag him away to some nearby woods to search for mushrooms.

  He turns out to be a dull, political animal, sticking to stock phrases about opportunities for entrepreneurs in his wonderful town and how it's a marvellous centre for technology (there's little evidence for this, but I nod sagely). He's deeply reluctant to talk about radioactivity, and although I force him to admit that food issues are of crucial importance, he won't elaborate. 'None of this land around here is dangerous,' he says. 'It's not a problem we have.'

  I suggest that local people are remarkably accepting of such a terrifying idea as radioactive food, and ask him whether their attitude has been shaped by Stalin's enforced famines in the 1930s (Stalin took revenge on the rebellious Ukrainians by starving them in a shameful episode that killed 2.5-4.8 million people). He skips over the issue, saying, 'Actually, there is some debate about that.'

  What? Is he really denying that the famines happened? But he waves the question away. Many Ukrainians see themselves as ethnic Russians and he doesn't want to be seen to take sides. Well, what're 4 million murders between friends?

  I eventually give up and go looking for mushrooms, much to the mayor's relief. He's already carrying a large bag of mushrooms that he says he picked with his wife earlier that morning (I find out later that his stable girl actually picked them for him). In this endeavour we are more successful, finding masses of ceps and chanterelles. I'm overjoyed – I've never seen such an embarrassment of fungal riches, and it makes up for the disastrous interview.

  After bidding the mayor goodbye, I take some of the mayor's mushrooms to be tested at the market lab, just in case something interesting crops up. I wander in and our lovely shocking blonde chops them up and drops them into her strange radiation contraption. We chat for a few minutes until the machine goes 'ding' and I notice her jaw drop. Suddenly there's a palpable tension in the air.

  The lab technician is a very worried woman. She taps her calculator and shows it to us. It reads 2,300 becquerel (another unit of radio activity), and she points to her table of safe levels. My mushrooms are eight times too radioactive. 'Sorry? Say that again?'

  Eight times the safe levels.

  Is she surprised? 'Yes.'

  'But it can't be true: I picked these with the mayor.'

  'That's all very well – I'm glad you had a nice walk. But you'll have to throw the mushrooms away.'

  This is the woman who, just yesterday, had told me that they had found only five cases of radioactive food in the last year, and ten the previous one.

  I get straight on the phone to the mayor. 'We took the mushrooms to be tested and I have to warn you that they were eight times over the safe levels.'

  'So it doesn't matter. So it cannot be that they are seriously high.'

  'Are you still going to eat them?'

  'No problem, I will.'

  His cavalier approach astonishes me, but then he's a politician: I shouldn't be surprised at all. Did he really go and eat them? Who knows?

  I'm flabbergasted – not by the mayor, but by finding mushrooms that weren't just radioactive, but extraordinarily radioactive. Everywhere we go people say, 'There's no problem, nothing around here is contaminated, you journalists just try to stir things up.' I had begun to believe them, although I did wonder if a desperately poor country would really keep expensive radiation labs in the town if it didn't need them.

  I ask Hyena what she thinks about all this, and she's genuinely surprised that we've found such a high level of contamination. Is she worried about the mayor?

  'Ah,' she sighs. 'He is a fatalist maybe. And he tries to transfer his belief to other people of his town. So we live with radiation and we know there are a lot of people eager to come to Slavutych to work. And we pay this price of not paying attention to radiation.'

  Across the former Soviet Union, this is people's prime concern: a bit of money, housing and a functioning infrastructure. If that means they have to cope with a bit of radioactivity . . . well hey, they are willing to put their fingers in their ears and hum gently to avoid thinking about the potential horrors.

  Is this a kind of blackmail, I wonder, seeing as the Chernobyl Power Plant and its shutdown still needs thousands of workers? She doesn't think so. People here are happier than everywhere else in Ukraine. I don't get it: why aren't people worried or angry? Is it something to do with the Ukrainian national character?

  Ah,' Hyena's eyes light up. 'Yes, we are used to suffering, in taking burdens, shouldering disasters, absorbing pain and trudging on. Because no one's going to help you, and you have to keep on living.' She explains why no one smiles in the shops and restaurants: they see it as insincere – what is there to smile about? All these Americans who come over here are always smiling about nothing – what is wrong with them? There's nothing to smile about.

  On our last day in Slavutych we are spotted in the bar and invited to a drinks party by the Slavutych English-speaking ex-pat community, lorded over by Mavis, a Little England curtain-twitcher from Sunderland. The weirdness of being at a Chernobyl nuclear drinks party is trumped only by my conversation with Paul, a US radiation expert whose job is to analyse the risks of people's contact with radiation in order to assess the likely financial fall-out in insurance terms – i.e. how much radioactivity can the staff endure before the resulting medical and legal bills make it financially unbearable for their company? It's a strange and shameful extrapolation
of the financial from the human costs, and the conversation leaves me feeling grubby.

  I've become increasingly confused about the moral/economic/ political/medical/radioactive web of misery that the Chernobyl disaster has thrown over this area of the world and it's hard to draw conclusions. Maybe I'm confusing the Chernobyl that is an event in time with the Chernobyl that is a place full of people and lives. These people have consumed radioactivity and sighed deeply, and got on with their lives. On one level it's extraordinary, and on another it's inevitable and unremarkable.

  Ilyena tackles all of this in the way that Ukrainians know best: we retreat to a dacha and drink obscene, brain-numbing quantities of moonshine. Many Ukrainians genuinely believe that vodka flushes radiation out of their system. There's no medical evidence to support this . . . but that's not really the point.

  • • • • •

  Just before I leave Kiev for London I go for a final radiation check. I'm terrified. If I've picked up radionuclides, I might take radioactive contamination into my house, harming my kids and myself. I wonder if I've been reckless and stupid to eat food grown in the exclusion zone. A stern medic tells me to strip to my pants and enter a radiation chamber that looks like a turn-of-the-century relic from the Imperial War Museum. The door grinds shut, and a probe travels up and down a rickety track above me.

  When I emerge, Marc looks a little worried. They did see something, he says, and my nervous smile fades. The woman tells me that I have raised levels of radioactivity in my stomach. Oh. Shit.

  After letting me stew for a while she says that luckily it's within safe limits, the results aren't so bad and should return to normal in time. That's the last time I wear my immortal specs. What was I thinking?

  There is possibly one last twist to this story, and it's called 'radiation hormesis'. It's a controversial theory that ionizing radiation can actually be good for you at low doses, activating genes that repair radiation damage, which then also reduce damage from other causes. It's a radical theory with many detractors, but it would be a glorious twist if there was some truth in it.

  Ukrainians appear to be digging their heels into the ground to avoid being dragged back to the dark ages, and this has created a tough people who don't care much for insincere smiles. But I'm off to South Korea next, where I suspect they are primed for grinning, strapped into corporate joy-seats on a stellar economic trajectory that has taken the world by surprise for the last 50 years.

  SOUTH KOREA

  The Dog Eaters

  POPULATION: 49 million

  PERCENTAGE LIVING ON LESS THAN $2 A DAY: 50%

  UNDP HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX: 26/177

  CORRUPTION PERCEPTIONS INDEX POSITION: 42/163

  GDP (NOMINAL) PER CAPITA: $18,392 (34/179)

  FOOD AID RECIPIENTS: n/a

  MALNUTRITION: n/a

  South Korea is one of the great economic miracles of the 20th century. It leapt from being a dirt-poor, inward-looking, Chinese-dominated and war-ravaged wasteland in the 1950s to becoming one of the leading tiger economies of Asia. But underneath this extraordinary progress lie endless mucky secrets: dodgy corporate governance; some tricksy accounting (spectacularly revealed during the Asian financial crisis of 1997-9); and a comprehensive sweeping aside of barriers to industrial progress, such as democracy and human rights. During the middle of the 20th century corruption festered, and military rulers crushed opposition and ran the country for their own ends until 1992, when a semblance of genuine democracy began to creep in.

  It's a better place now, but whilst corruption is still a huge problem, most modern Koreans are reluctant to criticize. Perhaps this is due to the power of Confucian hierarchical systems and the obsessive respect shown to elders. Or perhaps they're just easily embarrassed (Koreans do seem to have a debilitating fear of embarrassment). Either way, there are some problems they'd rather tuck under the carpet . . .

  I'm going to South Korea to find out about dogmeat. Not the strange meatesque compound we feed to dogs, but meat that has come from dogs raised for human consumption. I know, I know, it's an emotive subject, but it's one that the UK media has generally used only for hysterical and unedifying journalism. Most reporters, including some from my own beloved BBC, have seen fit to file copy essentially declaiming: OH, MY GOD, THEY EAT DOGS!

  So here's what's under the Korean carpet: in the run-up to the Seoul Olympics in 1988, dog restaurants were banned in order to deflect national embarrassment over 'unsightly food' (heaven forfend). As soon as the Olympics were over, the restaurants swiftly reappeared without opposition. When the football World Cup came along in 2002, there was another furore. The FIFA president himself urged South Koreans to stop eating dogmeat. (Quite why a bunch of football executives installed themselves as arbiters of carnivorous relativism is unclear, and certainly declamations of morality are pretty laughable coming from either FIFA or the IOC.)

  Whatever their reasons, it was enough to embarrass the Koreans, and despite the fact that dog is a popular national dish, embarrassment is the one thing they can't handle. The dogmeat dealers were all swept off the streets again. By this time, though, the government had already removed all legislation from the industry, thereby officially ignoring its existence, so now they can't be said to sanction it (and the international community is assuaged), yet they haven't lost face at home to nationalistic dog-eating voters. Brilliant!

  As a result, dog farmers can do what they want to the 1-3 million dogs raised each year for human consumption.

  I'm hoping that this visit will provoke a thoughtful and dignified moral exploration of food taboos, rather than an ethical bun fight. I'm going to try to keep an open mind, take a look at the whole industry, try to understand the Korean national character, do a bit of moral cogitation and, as long as it's been raised decently, at the end of the trip I'd like to eat dog.

  When I first told my wife about this plan she was wearily appalled (she's yet to match my enthusiasm for eclectic foods, but I'm working on her), but she later became genuinely worried about the reaction from the public – people who might target me for eating dog. I told her, 'I'm not doing this in a gung-ho, look-how-hard-I-am extreme eating kind of way,' but she was still nervous. 'There are weird people out there,' she said. And she was to be proved right.

  Let's get one thing out of the way: I don't see anything particularly wrong with eating dog. I don't think I'm a nasty person. I certainly haven't set out to upset animal-lovers and I won't steal your schnauzer if you invite me for supper – I just think that if you've resolved the moral and emotional complexities of carnivorousness to eat cows, pigs and chickens (and I think I have), then you should be able to eat pretty much anything, as long as it's lived a decent life.

  I may differ from the vast majority of people in Britain on this one, but it seems odd that one intelligent, cute, loving animal that has stood by man's side and sustained him in his hours of need (I'm talking about the noble pig here) is somehow less valuable than another. At the same time I'm not blind to emotion: I know that people see dogs as companions, and there's a powerful bond between people and their pets. But what about when they're not raised as pets? I'm not eating your dog, after all.

  I believe a lot of other things about carnivorousness, namely that we shouldn't cause unnecessary pain to animals we eat, and that we have a responsibility of care towards all those animals that give their lives for our stomachs. I'd like to think that we have an unspoken contract with the animals we eat (as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall states eloquently in Meat), and it's one that supermarket shoppers in the UK violate hypocritically every day when buying battery chickens and intensively reared pork.

  • • • • •

  I sit on the aeroplane wondering what the hell I'm doing. After all my self-righteous justification of dog-eating, I start to think rationally. It's pretty early in my career as a food writer and TV presenter and I've decided to eat the one meal that's guaranteed to upset everybody on the known planet: my wife, my kids and my do
g-owning mother, but also everyone who watches food programmes and buys food books . . . in other words, anyone who might conceivably be called an audience.

  I love dogs. But I also love cats, ducks, pigs, cows, chickens, rabbits, quails, chinchillas, goats (I especially love goats), cats and mice. I don't believe that any of them has any less of a right to avoid being eaten. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they should be eaten. Or does it? This is the problem with being a thinking carnivore – you have to spend so much time and effort justifying your actions. Part of the joy of being a vegetarian must be that life is so much easier.

  Seoul

  We arrive in Seoul. It's one of those super-modern, dystopian fantasy cities lit by neon signs and vast electronics ads. It's corporate, sober and impersonal, in marked contrast to my guide Yoon-Jung, who is gorgeous, funny and friendly, although she betrays her Koreanness in her ferocious work ethic and propensity to turn lightly pink immediately after drinking alcohol. I like her immediately.

  Although I'm knackered, I've heard that food here is a real adventure and this fires my gastronautical zeal so I drag Yoon-Jung out to the nearby Itaewon Galbi restaurant for an induction into the strange and wonderful cuisine of Korea. We eat semi-fermented raw crab (which tastes like rotten crab, unsurprisingly, and much as I try to enjoy it . . . I don't). Our table has a charcoal grill in the middle, and the waitress brings us a variety of ribs, prawns and chicken that we cook ourselves. This is my kind of eating: hands-on stuff, with a sea of extra bowls of kimchi (fermented cabbage with chilli, which tastes great, but doesn't half make you windy), red pepper sauce and various vegetables. Yoon-Jung turns lightly pink, and we all turn in for an early night.

  My First Dog Farm

  Talk about being thrown in at the deep end: it's my first day and I am on my way to a dog farm. I overslept this morning, so I'm already in a bit of a fluster. 'Dog farm!' Ye gods, it's such an alien concept to me that it sends shivers down my spine, like the idea of a child farm. But I mustn't be a slave to sentiment: fear and ignorance is how prejudice evolves, and just because it's unusual doesn't mean that it's bad.