A long way to go to make our food safe

Food safety department sources said they had conducted checks in several shops, malls and outlets to take samples of different kinds of food items.

Multiple cases of high levels of lead and MSG in Maggi noodles has rattled us so much that our nation appears to have woken up to the need for better labelling of foodstuff. It took a major scare that led to the recall of 27,400 tonnes of noodles worth Rs 320 crore to bring us to a point where we will evaluate from scratch the entire process of testing, packaging and labelling of food products that 1.2 billion people consume regularly. There is reason to believe that not only have we in India come to accept some of the world’s worst food safety standards, but has also allowed states to have very weak infrastructure. The only positive is that the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India is finally looking beyond just more rigorous testing of food.

The FSSAI has ambitious plans to regulate salt, sugar and fat elements in food, force restaurants to list the calorie count of whatever they serve and make the labelling a far more scientific process than now. The FSSAI will also issue guidelines soon on food for schoolchildren. It may take years of back breaking work for panels of doctors, dieticians, nutritionists and representatives of premier food testing institutions to lay out the roadmap for a whole new era of food safety regulations, as well as dietary recommendations, for a population barely aware of what is good for health.

A very significant fact to emerge from the Maggi episode in India as well as the testing by US food authorities of food imports from India, including noodles, is the distinct possibility of excessive levels of lead and pesticides in our food products. The former is probably there in our water while the matter of pesticides can only be tackled by educating millions of farmers, grocers and food processors of the dangers of these deadly chemicals getting into the food chain. A sea change must come about in the very process of crop production if we are to guard the nation from eating its way to ill-health and suffering the resulting damage to the population and the GDP.

Let us not pretend even for a moment that we have a watertight food supply chain, food safety procedures and water treatment processes. Our entire infrastructure must be examined from first principles, on which governments have a moral responsibility as people would like to know where all their taxes are going and whether enough is being pumped into reviewing the most basic resource of life. What is food security really worth if food safety is not guaranteed? Do we need more such branding crises before we act to save ourselves from slow poisoning?