September 12, 2002 By MICHAEL WINES MOSCOW, Sept. 10 - Good news for Muscovites! "There are practically no cases of radioactive watermelons this year," says Andrei A. Buyanov. All right. Maybe that is practically good news. Then again, it could be worse. Some of the lingonberries here all but glow in the dark. It is radioactive-produce season in Moscow, and it's a bad one. Or, depending on one's perspective, a great one: so far this summer, the inspectors at the Moscow City veterinarian's office, have confiscated a ton of hot lingonberries, blueberries and practically nonexistent melons. And cranberry and mushroom seasons are yet to come. At this rate, says Mr. Buyanov, the office's amiable, crew-cut deputy chief, seizures could exceed last year's 3,050 pounds by a good 10 percent. And last year's seizures were slightly above those the year before. Mr. Buyanov displays little pleasure in his ever increasing haul of radioactive fruit. But it does suggest that he and his inspectors are doing their job, which is to nab edibles rich in cesium and strontium before they reach the stalls in any of the city's 69 open-air produce markets. If anyone wonders why Moscow needs a corps of atomic food inspectors, the answer is simple: the city lies a bare 415 miles from Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear-power station, which belched a Hiroshima bomb's worth of isotopes into the air when one of its reactors blew apart in April 1986. If anyone wonders why this task falls to the veterinary service, that answer is simple, too: besides lingonberries and mushrooms, the inspectors are on constant lookout for hot sirloin and pork chops. Lest this sound alarmist, it should be said that grocery shopping in Moscow is a completely roentgen-free experience (with one exception, noted later), thanks to the vigilance of the atomic food inspectors. Even if the inspectors were to vanish tomorrow, Russians could still safely eat most anything they chose (with several exceptions, noted immediately below). The problems mostly arise with what Irina I. Rozanova, the chief of the city's food-inspection laboratory, calls forest produce - mushrooms, berries and other delicacies that, often as not, are hand-picked in the wild by folks looking to supplement their incomes. The quality of farm-grown food can be monitored fairly easily. Not so forest produce. "Normally, some middleman buys it from various sources and brings it to market," she said. "And when he's asked where it comes from, the seller just gives the name of some region near Moscow." Dramatically demonstrating the perils posed by produce-smugglers, Ms. Rozanova opened a laboratory jar, plucked out a suspicious-looking dried mushroom from Bryansk, a Russian region bordering Chernobyl, and probed it with her alpha-beta-gamma spectrometer. "It shows the cesium content is 20 times the admissible level," she said. Cesium 137 is easily absorbed by the body and has a half-life of 30 years. Mushrooms tend to soak it up, Ms. Rozanova said, lending new meaning to the term "mushroom cloud." As fate has it, Russians utterly dote on wild mushrooms. Not far behind are blueberries, cranberries and lingonberries, which are indistinguishable from cranberries, save that they are a bit smaller and grow on bushes instead of in bogs. So the men and women of the veterinarian's office are posted in tiny laboratories at each of the city's 69 produce markets. There, with hand-held scanners and more sophisticated measuring machines, they take the radioactive measure of every crate that comes through their doors. Anything suspected of radiating is shipped off to Ms. Rozanova's lab for a final determination, then handed over to a produce-destruction squad if the initial findings are confirmed. Radioactive-produce season runs roughly from June through October. First come the blueberries and lingonberries, which ripen earlier in Belarus and Ukraine than in Russia. About now come the forest mushrooms. In October it will be glowing-cranberry time. Mr. Buyanov and his inspectors have caught 160 radioactive shipments so far this season. "Nobody sells anything at a market without a test," he said, "and at markets where there are no labs, the sale of produce is banned." Which makes for an airtight, lead-lined inspection system. With one glaring exception: the kerchief-clad, gap-toothed grandmothers who illegally peddle fresh produce at hundreds of street corners, roadside stands and metro stations. "We don't regulate them," Mr. Buyanov said severely. "Better to buy at a market where it's all checked." But even hardened Muscovites cannot resist a wizened babushka trying to support her grandchildren by selling fruit. So buy, already. Just stay away from the lingonberries. You don't know where they've been. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company