At the Mt Maunganui market, an old man stopped at my stall and told me something very strange.

I didn’t really believe him at first. I just smiled politely and said, “Ok, thanks. I’ll check this information.” But when I got home and typed his words into Google, I was stunned.

Suddenly, a few memories from my childhood made much more sense.

Back in 1986, about two thousand kids from my school were sent to a summer camp for three months. It was an adventure for all of us — an overnight train ride with twenty carriages full of children!

I remember that summer clearly: the supermarkets across the country had a shortage of buckwheat. Yet at the camps, every evening — or at least every second night — thousands of children from schools all over the eastern regions were served roasted buckwheat kasha, usually with ox liver or cutlets.

We didn’t think twice about it at the time. We loved it — buckwheat kasha was always delicious. But now I realize why we were fed so much of it.

It was the summer right after the Chernobyl disaster.

The old man’s story explained it. As a young soldier, he had been sent to Japan, near Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He told me that in some villages, many people were sick from radiation. But in other nearby villages, people seemed perfectly healthy. The soldiers were puzzled — until they discovered the difference in diet.

The healthy villagers all consumed buckwheat — in the form of soba noodles or soba tea — every day. The sick villagers did not.

Soba in Japanese means buckwheat.

It seems our government knew this fact very well.