Fried samosa and lemon-soda from a roadside stall or a sandwich made in front of you using allegedly freshly baked or toasted bread or packaged noodles or branded ketchup or soft drinks or fancy high-priced meals at a 5-star hotel or the food being used at home – do you have any idea of the supply chain that brought it to your palate?
Especially, but not only, the cooking mediums we use. Vanaspati, edible oils, ghee or butter. How did they reach you, are the conditions of carriage in letter and spirit the same as they would be in other countries, especially with the international brands? Or is everybody on par with the roadside stall at the end of the day?
The recent noodles with MSG controversy has opened this subject to supply chain audits from farm to food-store by not just the government agencies but by many of the players themselves. And having had experience of carrying food grade products both dry and liquid, bulk and unitised, as also co-ordinating the earliest movements of refrigerated food product exports from India, I speak from practical experience as well as knowledge.
International movement of food grade and potable products like grains, lentils, edible oils, potable liquids and similar are carried by ships under extremely stringent conditions. It starts from there.
At the other end, the customer is told something like – store in dry and cool conditions. Or, needs refrigeration at all times. Consume in 2 hours after being opened. So on and so forth.
Look carefully at the laws pertaining to colas (sweetened carbonated coloured waters), for example – they need to be transported and stored in temperature controlled conditions, not stored out in the open next to highways or moved around in open trucks. No where else in the reasonable world will you see crates of soft drinks lying exposed to the sun and heat – very simple reason why, the chemical changes that occur make them very carcinogenic. And the plastic packaging leaches into the soft drink.
Point one – the complete supply chain has to be under temperature fetyand pressure controlled conditions. And stored in shade. Do any of us leave our vegetables and food out in the open in the sun (except to dry)? Even the footpath vendors will place an umbrella over the fresh food and sprinkle water on it while perspiring themselves. But we educated people will buy processed food that has traveled across deserts and mountains and sea-ports in open trucks!
And the quality of those trucks.
A ship carrying edible oils, for example, not only has to provide pressurised and temperature controlled stainless steel or specially lined tanks, but can also for the rest of its natural life as a ship never carry a grade of any liquid cargo which is higher in rating than the most inferior cargo carried unless the owners are ready to spend a huge sum of money getting every square centimetre of tank space, every running centimetre of piping and every valve thoroughly cleaned by independent facilities ashore.
Many of these liquid cargoes have very complex instructions as a part of the seller-buyer contracts which have to be followed to the last dot on the i. These instructions, as far as the ship is concerned, end at the valve on the ship connecting to the pipeline from ashore.
What happens after that?
Typically, in an Indian seaport, the better importers and exporters have their facilities on par with the best worldwide. Their tank farms and tank containers for onward transportation by road and/or rail are maintained to global best practices.
But there are others who take short-cuts right from the moment the liquid edible cargoes leave the ship for imports into India. Seaports in India are not open for public scrutiny, but the signs of all sorts of short-cuts are visible on our roads and off our highways as well as at storage facilities up-country, Food Corporation of India go downs and silos are just one example but by no means are they alone or are some of the private players paragons of virtue.
And then there are tanker-trucks. One way they will carry, say, edible oils. On the return leg they will carry, say, molasses. Cleaning between cargoes is done, if at all, manually using laundry soaps and human beings using brooms and mops. The question of temperature and pressure control simply does not exist, and very often the tanks used are not even insulated. As a result, the liquid edible oils and food grade products which would move from, say, a Gujarat port to a factory in a North Indian state, would go through a few weeks on the road during which they would absorb not just traces of previous cargoes and cleaning agents but also experience temperature changes from ultra cold nights to hot days as they drive through the plains.
It is time we started asking the corporates who sell us packaged food, especially liquids, how do they move their products across the country?
Especially, but not only, the cooking oils and the soft drinks.
And if they don’t answer, then please ask FSSAI.
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