Did any of the shrimp have unsafe levels of radioactivity?
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2026
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Unsafe? No, it was well below any regulations for unsafe dosages. However it was detectable above the average baseline which is valid cause for concern because more contamination could happen. It ended up that there was a steel scrap smelter near the shrimp packing facility that somehow got medical equipment that uses cesium-137 got into the scrap and as it was smelted down, a detectable amount of cesium got released into the air and ended up on the shrimp.
So the shrimp from that place has been being dusted with pollution from a scrap metal smelter this entire fucking time and we only know about this because they managed to accidentally expose themselves. Amazing.
There's a certain level of feces that can legally be in food
Way more than that I’m afraid!
John Morrell, the meat packing company has acceptable levels of animal parts like teeth and hair, cause you can’t always prevent a rat from crawling into the meat grinders!
The standards of today are still significantly better than even a hundred years ago. I mean think back to the time of windmills and watermills, to drive massive grindstones. It used to be grinding wheat carried very substantial risks that the flour would have strait up chunks of grindstone that broke off from the milling. London would have regular cholera outbreaks because they were dumping human waste into the Thames where their drinking supply was pulled from. Once they stopped doing that, cholera was dramatically reduced
At a certain point there are just acceptable risks to the regulations we have to the manufacturing processe we have and we as induviduals just need to be moderately careful with preparing our foods. Washing fresh fruits and veg is always a good idea, cook your food to proper temperatures to kill off enough bacteria, wash your hands when you prepare food, don't prep raw meats on the same surfaces as fresh veg. If you get salmonella because you cut up raw veggies for a veggie board on a cutting board that you prepped raw chicken on no amount of regulation is going to protect people, and that's with salmonella already quite rare in a lot of manufactured product, something like 1 in 20 or 1 in 25 at your average grocery store.
Here's a link to a Josh Johnson bit about radioactive shrimp!
Josh Johnson has been my favourite thing about the last couple years
He's quite an impressive comic.
Cs-137 is helpful in a way in producing a pretty distinctive gamma signature. What's scarier to me are all the more subtle adulterants that have come and gone through the global food supply, never detected, that have damaged the genes of millions of people
Shrimp flavour bomb!