Tareen Rahman :The Maggi fiasco exposes the inefficiency of our food safety establishment. Lead today, arsenic tomorrow is the common view expressed by confused consumers who spoke about their panicky feelings to our correspondent.Food items now sold in the market is containing poisonous chemicals which is totally unexpected and a great shock for the public. Maggi is already off the shelves of Bangladeshi stores. Even after BSTI gave the green signal to Nestle to go ahead and sell this highly popular food item, Nestle Company in Bangladesh could not thank the BSTI authorities and breathe a sigh of relief as consumers did not buy their story about safety-defense.Even if Nestle hadn’t withdrawn it from the shelves, shopkeepers would have done it as lead, one of the alleged contaminants, is dangerous for its primary consumer, i.e. children.At a closer look, what the episode exposes is not the efficiency of our food safety establishment, but its inherent inability to prevent food with hazardous contaminants from reaching the people. For some strange reason, Maggi got caught with lead, a metal that has no role in food processing or the manufacturing of the noodle. It means that the contamination could have occurred through some ingredients, water or even through the assembly line and utensils.A common question being raised about the Maggi scandal is how lead made its way into the noodle when it has no role in making the product. The most possible source is the water the company could have used. Lead contamination of surface and ground water in India is widely documented, both in academic literature and mainstream media, in India. Closer scrutiny might find lead in more food products in India because water and atmosphere have become so toxic. It’s lead today and probably arsenic or mercury tomorrow. It’s Maggi today and something else tomorrow, as it was cola and pesticides a few years ago. Essentially, what this indicates is the dangerous levels that our environment has plunged to. There will be a stage when food processing is a dicey business because every single input can be contaminated. Unfair practices and safety short-cuts by manufacturers and poor vigilance of state and central food safety establishments (the right to provide licenses is split between the two based on size, scale and turn-over) make the situation frightening.However, what’s still comforting for India and neighboring Bangladesh (where the Maggi panic has taken full swing) is the fact that the rest of the world also is not immune to food poisoning scandals, some of it deliberately done for profiteering. For instance, in Taiwan, a massive scandal was unearthed in 2014, in which cooking oil and dried Tofu were found to be deliberately adulterated to boost profits. Vegetables and milk had been found to be contaminated in parts of Europe in 2013, and beef-burgers were reportedly contaminated by pork and horse meat in the UK. China, which witnessed deliberate milk adulteration in 2008, in which the manufacturers had mixed melamine to make their product look thicker, is endemic to food adulteration.While Maggi got caught in the net, several others will continue to pass through our porous system. Given the extensive scale of unregulated trading and highly localised manufacturing that go under the radar of food safety authorities, corruption and poor consumer-awareness, even a reasonable level of food safety looks impossible.What will make the situation irreversibly worse is the degradation of our environment – water, air and soil. When our air, soil and water sources are dirty, harmful substances will certainly make their way to our food and we will be helpless.
