TOKYO — Now offered for lunch at a Japanese-government restaurant: a rich curry and rice, topped with Fukushima vegetables fresh from the nuclear-emergency zone.
It is part of an unlikely twist in the eat-local movement as the government presses a skeptical public to accept that food from the contaminated northeastern coastline should be purchased, roasted and devoured, not avoided.
“Damage by perception,” reads a poster promoting the revamped menu at Sakuna, located inside a government ministry. “Let’s fight against it.”
When the restaurant opened for business Friday, politicians rushed in, filling a table of 12. Three parliamentarians were there, as was the foreign minister, Takeaki Matsumoto.
Prime Minister Naoto Kan also has been doing his part, urging people to eat food from the disaster-hit areas as a show of support. So has Yukio Edano, the chief Cabinet secretary, who went to a farmers market and ate a Fukushima strawberry.
“Only safe produce is being distributed,” Edano said. “Please eat it.”
To be sure, no one is pretending that all Fukushima food is absolutely safe; many products from the nuclear zone are indeed contaminated. But the message from the government is that the Japanese should have faith in a monitoring system intended to keep cesium- and iodine-tainted products off the shelves.
The officials hope that their promotion of Fukushima food can end the growing confusion about what is safe and what is dangerous.
Farmers from Fukushima and surrounding prefectures now fit into two categories. Some cannot be helped by promotion of any kind because they have products that truly are unfit for sale or consumption. The rest have products that pass inspection, but they are finding that wholesalers are reluctant to buy them, figuring shoppers will still resist.
“When you talk about Fukushima, it’s a vast area,” said Takanobu Tsuda, a food-safety investigator from Japan Agriculture, a powerful union of co-ops. “Some areas farther inland — their food is fine.”
