One disadvantage of eating lichens, particularly for human
hunters who eat the meat of caribou and deer, is that lichens
absorb and accumulate radioactive fallout far more than vascular
plants and pass them along in the food chain. As Richardson and
Young (1977) put it, "Liden (1961)...showed that reindeer meat
contained 280 times the 137Cs level of beef produced in the same
general area." In a study in Alaska (Viereck, 1964) it was found
that "Lichens have concentrations of strontium-90 and cesium-137 of
from 10 to 100 times that of most other plants from either
temperate or northern regions...Caribou and reindeer have
concentrations of strontium-90 in meat and bones that are about 25-
30 times that found in meat in the average U.S. diet. Cesium-137
levels are from 3-300 times that found in beef...Strontium-90 in
bone in caribou-eating Alaskan Eskimos is being laid down at about
four times the rate of that of the average U.S. citizen...Inland
Alaskan Eskimos at Anaktuvuk in the summer of 1962 had whole body
counts of cesium-137 ...approximately 50-100 times the
concentration of cesium-137 in people of temperate latitudes."
After the Chernobyl disaster many reindeer in northern Europe had
to be destroyed without their meat being consumed.

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