Hassknecht said:
Also, deformations like this aren't even unusual and don't happen because of radiation. Physical trauma to a plant, for example, can lead to splitting and there's all kinds of stuff that can happen. The grocery stores and markets all receive just the perfect fruits and vegetables, the freaky things don't get out.
Having grown up in a household with a mother that tended acres-worth of gardens every year... Yeah, you see some interesting things EVERY harvest. On top of her tomatoes, onions, peaches, lemons, grapefruits, avocados, strawberries, and a whole host of other fruits and veggies I can't even think of, she's also begun growing what I affectionately refer to as "Demon Squash", both because I don't like the taste of it, and because the shit's HUGE! Any given gourd she collects can be as tall as she is (a bit over 5 feet) with a long and slender structure topped off with a watermelon-shaded bulb at the base. Obviously phallic shapes aside, those things are freaky. They and her tomatoes regularly grow in incredibly different and bizarre shapes all the time.
Studies into the effects of radiation on organisms have arrived to the conclusions that the reason for widespread belief in cockroaches inheriting the Earth after nuclear devastation is because the less-intricate organisms have simpler anatomies, whereas larger organisms like humans are more sensitive to radiation exposure. As it turns out, however, while cockroaches CAN survive from radiation exposure that is instantly fatal to humans, it's still fatal to them, and far tinier insects are actually far more likely to "inherit the Earth" that they are. Hell, even
Mythbusters dedicated an episode to this topic, so it's not like this is a mystery to any average Joe with access to google... XD
In short, it's not impossible for the radiation leaks to have impacted the growth of those plants, but it's also not terrible noteworthy. Plants aren't people. You can't cut a man's head off, put a younger man's head on the stump, then expect the younger man to spring to life and "grow up" on his older body. But you can "clone" a tree by connecting a young branch to the severed end of an older branch. You can combine the genetic information between apples and pears over a few generations and get hybrid fruits, but no amount of "genetic crossing" will result in hybrid human/chimpanzee offspring. There are plenty of countries that were heavily impacted over the past several decades by (largely-US-based) bombings and artillery shellings that used depleted uranium. The radioactivity from DU shells is very faint compared to a nuclear reactor's, yet those countries have suffered widespread birth defects and increases in cases of cancer, anyway. So it's not unreasonable to understand that the long-term affects of radiation in their environment WILL surface over the years, in Japan. But Ukraine is still around, and we don't associate Ukrainians with having 2 heads.
Stuff will happen, but outsides of the certain-to-follow humanitarian efforts to draw attention to some of the worse cases, we'll largely just see the more simple biologies in Japan showing some unexpected curiosities over the years. Expect to answer some questions on your Red Cross Blood Donor questionnaires regarding any trips to Japan since 2011, and not a whole lot much else...
