Food adulteration: How to test quality of food products? FSSAI releases booklets for students

FSSAI releases booklets on food adulteration! In a bid to spread awareness about food adulteration, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has prepared lesson plan booklets for school students to detect adulteration of food. As part of the project, separate small booklets have been prepared by a team of experts for the students from class III to class Xth which detail various ways to detect adulteration and impurities in their food. The booklets can be downloaded from the website of Eat Right School, an initiative adopted by the government in the year 2016 to spread awareness about food safety amongst school children.

The booklets which have been released vary in size and content for students of different classes. While the booklet released for class III contains 45 pages, the size of the booklets of class Xth students increases to 68 pages. Far from being just a self-awareness kit for students to get aware about adulteration and its evils, the book is replete with tests, experiments along with their manual procedures which the students can undertake to actually detect adulterated food. The team of experts also appear to have factored in the need of trained teachers and school laboratories while preparing the course book as the lessons are detailed and need the infrastructure of a functional science lab to be undertaken. Apart from detailing the types of adulteration and resulting harms, the booklets consist of major lab tests to test the quality of various food products. For instance, the booklet for class 3 grade consists of tests to check the quality of food products like milk, egg, honey, pulses, salt, butter, icecream among others.

Each test is accompanied by a manual procedure to be adopted and various steps to be followed to ascertain the quality of the food products. At the beginning of the book, a note to teachers has also been appended along with general lab safety rules to be complied by the students and teachers. The booklets have also been interspersed with various coloured photographs to help students learn better and also keep them hooked to the experiments. While the initiative is laudable as leave aside students, even adults are devoid of any functional knowledge to test adulteration in various food products, the real success will only come if such experiments are conducted on a large scale in various schools spanning across different parts of the country.