South Korean Olympics Team To Screen Its Food Over Fukushima Radiation Concerns

• ByAyushi Ray     |    July 19, 2021

South Korean Olympics team to screen its food over Fukushima radiation concerns. Food will be cooked separately for athletes and screen ingredients for radiation during the Tokyo Olympics, an official said on Monday. South Korea has periodically irked Japan with such steps as curbing imports of Japanese seafood, citing safety concerns after the 2011 Fukushima tsunami and nuclear disaster. A spokesperson for the Korean Sport & Olympic Committee said it has booked a hotel near the Olympic village to prepare and deliver boxed meals to its athletes, adding that the country has run its own food programmes at every Olympic Games to help its athletes feel at home. Relations between the two Asian neighbours, already at a low ebb amid feuds over territorial claims and their wartime history, were further dented on Monday when Seoul said President Moon Jae-in would not visit the Games, which open on Friday, for what would have been his first summit with Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga.

The South Korean team, at the request of the International Olympic Committee, removed banners with an historic reference to a 16th-century war with Japan from their Olympic village accommodation balconies in Japan. It is not uncommon for countries to bring their own chefs to the Olympics – the United States served its own food at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. But the South Korean team has also stepped up its food safety checks at the Tokyo Games to gauge radioactive caesium levels, with its own chefs preparing about 400 meals a day. “We are doing screening tests for caesium in food ingredients from kimchi we are bringing from home to other items including Japanese ingredients,” said the South Korean Olympic spokesperson,

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