Half-Lives and Healthy Bodies: Discourses on Contaminated Food and Healing in Postchernobyl Ukraine

Abstract

In Ukraine, the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident lives on in the collective memory as both a conscious and unconscious element of everyday life. Radiation, contaminated, and dirty are words that one hears often in Ukraine, especially in reference to food. The production and consumption of food additives and pharmaceuticals called radioprotectors are responses to the collective fear among Ukrainians that they continue to ingest contaminated foods, even fifteen years after the nuclear accident at Chernobyl.