Never underestimate hunger

[mayamaia]

Endangered horses in Chernobyl exclusion zone are being poached for food.

Eeeeyep. Wild horsemeat from a place where they have a very good chance to have fed on radioactive material. Hungry people, man, hungry hungry people.

Comments

[tristissima.livejournal.com]

Die tomorrow, or die 30 years from now . . . *shrug*

This kind of thing is useful to remember just how privileged we are. Hell, we can CHOOSE to eat irradiated meat (much of the process of making various foods safe involves irradiating them -- you probably knew that, huh?)

That is a phenomenon that I have oft found fascinating, by the nonce. Excluding for the moment things like "slumming", it is intriguing that many of the things the poor are driven to by need (such as this) are things the rich do for some supposed benefit. One could easily parlay this point of interest into discussions of the Noble Savage and whatnot, but I prefer to note how socioeconomic status changes the relationship of the agent (which is a rather nebulous construct in this context) and what might be called the "core act" or, possibly, in Sumerian, "the me of the act" and how that changes the manifest nature of the act. For the poor, it is an act of desperation or of lack of choice (or, at least, I guess so -- I'm a rich U.S. citizen; go ask the subaltern how they construct it) and thus they, again by my guessing, do so without much fine control. The rich, on the other hand, are choosing to do so and so do so with great attention to detail. Time and access to instruments also play into this, of course. The question remains: are the two doing the same thing or does something like socioeconomic class change the very nature of an act?

Just some meandering thoughts, hoping to spur discussion ;-)

[mayamaia.livejournal.com]

There's a big difference between irradiated meat and radioactive meat. This story is dealing with the second one. The first has been exposed to a high level of radiation to kill bacteria but is not radioactive itself, the second contains radioactive elements that are probably too diffuse to cause immediate damage, but can build up in your tissues over time. Depending on the element involved, the buildup can lead to organ destruction, radiation sickness and/or cancer. (Sometimes organ destruction is the best option.)