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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Hard to digest

Hard to digest

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published Published on Jul 9, 2010   modified Modified on Jul 9, 2010

Along with expanded availability and access, safety is one of the three prongs of food security. However, we in India have shockingly little control over the quality of the food we consume — apart from flat-out contami-nation at the level of agricultural produce to the hidden dangers of additives and preservatives and flavours, which can contain benzoates, glutamates, mono- and di-glycerides, nitrates, nitrites, and sulfites, all of which are linked with serious health hazards.

Obviously, processed food is not a scourge of the magnitude it is in certain Western countries — where people like Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan have written jeremiads on the iniquities of “industrial food”. It is often a matter of competing priorities. After all, on a limited budget, should policy-makers worry more about the sliver of a chance that a food ingredient poses a long-term carcenogenic danger, when a far bigger and inexcusable problem is systemic malnutrition? We strike bargains because of the large demands placed on us — using more preservatives and additives for minimal spoiling, given tightly stretched transport and storage logistics. Also, given that 90 per cent of the Indian food market is in the unorganised sector, it is difficult to control for chemical content in all the nodes in the supply chain.

India’s spotty food safety situation is not because of a lack of legal instruments — the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India formed in 2005 has exacting standards, so much so that farmers were up in arms about the extent of punishment for adulteration (the fine is six times as much as that of the earlier Food Adulteration Act). However, enforcement duties are dispersed among various Central and state authorities. What’s more, many of the FSSA Act’s rules are yet to be notified and there is little awareness of its requirements. Chew on this: a FICCI study found last month that over 30 per cent of its respondents from the food processing industry were oblivious to the very existence of the FSSA Act. If anything is to change, it must come from the industry itself, as it realises that in an increasingly sophisticated market, reputation rides on good business practices.


The Indian Express, 9 July, 2010, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/hard-to-digest/644237/


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