Poison in our kitchen: How deadly chemicals have invaded India's food chain

Wake up and smell the coffee. Err...maybe, not. Who wants to start a new day with the depressing possibility that the first drink you chug down may have coffee-flavoured mud, starch or worse? A good ol' cuppa tea, then? What if it has coal tar dye? You'll end up with lung or skin cancer. Ouch. Pour out some apple juice. And puke your way to nirvana? It may just have fungi patulin. How about a glass of ice-cold milk? Brace for a jolt of deadly chemicals: antibiotic gentamicin, pumped indiscriminately into cows, that will give you hard-to-treat infections; pesticide boric acid that kills cockroaches and gives humans lead poisoning; preservative formalin that can change your kidneys forever. So just drink some water. But, first, pray that there's no bromate lurking in it, to turn on your cancer genes.

Wolf of food street

With the great instant noodle scare in the last few days, a fear psychosis has gripped the nation. Every food on your plate is suspect: all the items above have been recorded, reported or recalled by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) ever since it came into being in 2011. Harmful, dangerous, alien chemicals and non-foods are secretly invading our lives, as a culture of infectious greed grips much of our food chain: from farm to fork. At any given point, someone somewhere along multiple touch points on that chain is trying to get rich by altering, substituting, passing off or turning a blind eye to unacceptable processes and materials. A terrible human and economic cost looms large.

India is the world's worst food violator, reports global food source monitoring company, Food Sentry. China follows closely and the US is also one of the top 10. Most violated foods are raw or minimally processed, including seafood, vegetables, fruits, spices, dairy products, meats and grains. More than a third of food frauds take place due to "excessive or illegal pesticides", pathogen contamination and filth or insanitary conditions. "What's worrying is the mislabelling on products of packaged foods," says Dr Suneeta Chandorkar, Assistant Professor, Department of Food and Nutrition, Faculty of Family and Community Services, MS University, Vadodara. "They all say 'healthy' but tests have shown they are hardly that."

A very serious issue

A "really very serious issue," as Union Health Minister J.P. Nadda admitted in the budget session of Parliament in March. One out of fi ve food samples fails quality test in India, reports the FSSAI Annual Public Laboratory Testing Report, 2014-15. Out of 49,290 food samples tested by the apex food body, 8,469 did not clear the laboratory tests for food safety, bringing the rate of food fraud rate-adulteration, contamination or mislabelling to a gasp-worthy 20 per cent. It was just 13 per cent in 2011-12. Yet the number of convictions for economically motivated adulteration of food has come down from 3,845 in 2013-14 to just 1,256 now.

Data collated by FSSAI from across the country shows a steep rise in food fraud, with five states-UP, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh-accounting for more than 90 per cent of the total penalties levied. It's a very serious issue because the true extent of the impact of adulterated food on human health remains unknown. Food-borne dis-eases encompass a wide spectrum of illnesses and are a growing public health problem worldwide, says the World Health Organization (WHO) in its World Health Day 2015 report, 'How Safe Is Your Food'. Gastrointestinal, neurological, gynaecological, immunological to multi-organ failure and even cancer. They can manifest immediately with microbial pathogens or parasites, as in the case of about 400,000 children below age five whodie of diarrhoea every year in India. Or they can be chemical contaminants that accumulate in the body and snuff out life slowly over time. The full extent of the burden and cost of unsafe food is currently unknown, says the WHO, but its impact on global health, trade and development is considered to be immense.

Who stole my Maggi?

Everybody is singing a requiem to a ubiquitous yellow packet: mothers tired of cooking for fussy children, students living away from home, professionals too busy to cook, frugal retirees skittish about the purse strings. Iconic brand Maggi, that asked for "just two minutes of your time" for the past 33 years, has been declared "hazardous for human consumption" by the FSSAI. It will not be made, processed, distributed, sold or imported in the country. Although Swiss food giant Nestle India has challenged the validity of the tests, 20 million packs worth Rs 1,000 crore are being recalled.

"Adulteration in our daily food items has been proved time and again. But this is not just another case. This is heavy metal, completely the next level," says Amit Khurana, programme manager for food safety and toxins at the Centre for Science and Environment. "I am unable to figure out how the lead came in Maggi samples," says Chandorkar. Lead mostly comes from industrial effluents. In India, crops and vegetables draw it from water. "It could have been from a machine part gone wrong," she adds. To Narpinder Singh, president of the Association of Food Scientists and Technologists, India, however, adulteration from MNCs selling processed and packaged food is just the tip of the iceberg. "What about our street vendors? There's no monitoring over what they use," he says. The investigation over Maggi noodles will pinpoint the guilty parties. But the scandal lifts the lid off the casserole of India's real food story.

Sadism for breakfast

Nothing seems more wholesome than breaking an egg into a frying pan for breakfast. But do you wish to die of green diarrhoea from salmonella poisoning? Random sampling shows 5-7 per cent eggs across India are contaminated with the deadly bacteria. According to a 2012 research from the Indian Veterinary Research Institute, most of these happen from inhumane conditions, overcrowded cages, saturation with excrement and waste streams. That's not all, across India exists the widespread practice, though legally banned, of starving hens for profit. By depriving egg-laying hens of food for 14 days, poultry-owners can save expenses on feed and manipulate the egg-laying cycle. The suffering and drastic weight loss dramatically increases the risk of a hen laying salmonella-infected eggs.

Consider bread: if you thought good bread lies at the heart of a blissful day, think again. The flour used to make your daily bread, roti, chapati or parantha is also bleached, contains as many as 25 different chemicals, including fumigants, apart from mud, dust, insects and fungus. The result? Liver problems to diabetes to damaged kidneys and nervous system. What's more, scientists are sounding alarm over mycotoxin contamination in wheat, oats, maize and barley, from bad agricultural practice. Ask Sakshi Mishra, researcher with the Indian Institute of Toxicology Research, Lucknow, who detected the poisonous fungi in 30 per cent samples, out of which seven per cent exceeded the limit. A report published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture last year found excessive levels in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. The fungi can cause a range of disorders: jaundice to gastrointestinal bleeding.
Surely, one can bite into fruits, for all the goodness of antioxidants, healthful nutrients and fibre? But there too unscrupulous traders can beat you at it. In April, 12,000 kg mangoes that had been ripened artificially with the chemical ethephon, a plant growth regulator classified as "dangerous" and "corrosive", had to be destroyed in Goa by food safety officials. The fruit vendor, looking to make a quick buck, was quite aware of what he was doing: he had donned plastic gloves to dip the mangoes in the chemical.

Food detectives at war

It's a neatly-wrapped packet of suspicion and doubt. Someone thrusts it in through a square hole in the wall. Instantly weighed, checked and barcoded, it begins its journey through the food testing lab in Barasat, on the outskirts of Kolkata: clean-air showers, inoculation room for sterility, chromatography room to check nutrition, spectrophotometer room to verify colouring. Scientists in white coats and blue overalls crouch in concentrated silence over gleaming white machines that hum, whir and spew out data: heavy metals, pesticides, antibiotics, carcinogens. They are the behind-the-scenes food detectives of Edward Food Research and Analysis Centre (EFRAC), a top-line private lab with 12 accreditations from the Government of India and the United States Food and Drug Administration (USFDA). And they stand by their science: none of the 800 samples of Maggi they tested in the last one month has unacceptable levels of harmful chemicals. "My machines are 21 CFR Part 11 compliant," says CEO and microbiologist Balwinder Bajwa, "the USFDA's new enforcement for food security. I am not certifying Maggi. I am certifying my results."
That has put yet another question mark on the fate of our food: why have some labs found lead and MSG in Maggi while others did not? Can we trust our labs? Lead contamination in several samples was established by many laboratories in various parts of the country. But some states have given it a clean chit. About 11 states have already banned Maggi and as many have started testing it individually. Industry veteran and former CEO of Britannia, Sunil Alagh, has lambasted the food testing process in the country as "disastrous", blaming the government for destroying a brand. "I agree with @sunilalagh about destroying Maggi brand without proper evidence. I smell a sinister ploy and Nestle must get to bottom of it," Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, chief of Biocon, has tweeted.
"The blame game doesn't help what India faces," says consumer policy expert Bejon Misra. We have great choice and access to food today. Our supermarkets overflow with packaged, processed foods from all over the world. But what we believe we eat is often at odds with what we actually consume. "So severe has been thepublic outrage that it has ushered in a much-needed groundswell for a firmer governance of our food chain," he says. "For the first time, the government has lodged a case against a food giant with the National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission on behalf of consumers."
Many companies don't conduct due diligence on their supply chains. And then get away by paying a small penalty. "India is finally moving towards enforcement of food recall regulations. And it should be respected," adds Mishra. Companies with unsafe products will now have to inform consumers about contaminants, health hazards, outlets where it was found and a contact number for queries.
The FSSAI is in no mood to relent. Formed under the Food Safety and Standards Act of 2006, and effective since 2011, the fledgling body is determined to net both whales and minnows to ensure food safety and standards. In the last few years, it has dragged food and beverage majors-Heinz to Marico, Kellogg's to Britannia, Cadbury to Hindustan Unilever, Parle to Amway-for a range of reasons: misleading ads to unsafe use or overuse of chemicals. In May this year, theFSSAI ordered recall of energy drinks Monster, Tzinga and Cloud 9, arguing that the drinks use "irrational combination" of ginseng and caffeine. In January 2015, the FSSAI started a nationwide survey and testing of everyday foods-dairy, pulses, edible oil, poultry, fruits and vegetable-to frame policy interventions against adulteration and contamination.

New methods, new dangers

Watch out for the new kid on the block. It has come straight from the Shaanxi province of China and flooded the markets of Kerala. At a glance it looks like normal rice: the reason why no one bothered to look too closely. It's smooth, slippery, milky white with every single grain formed perfectly. If you soak it in water, it will float. If you boil it, it will turn into a hard sticky mass, like wax paper. If you put fire to it, it will light up instantly. And if you eat it, you will land up in hospital with severe stomach condition-exactly what happened in Kerala. Made of potatoes, sweet potatoes and polymer at a paltry production cost, it's the latest food fraud in the country: fake plastic rice. The packets were confiscated once people started falling ill after buying the rice.

Adulteration methods are increasingly more sophisticated. Detection systems have to be more alert, say experts. Simple adulteration of fruit juices by addition of water, or stones in rice are now giving way to deadly pesticides, non-permitted synthetic colours, slapdash use of antibiotics and DNA-altering carcinogens. Under the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act of India, 1954, eight synthetic colours were mentioned; the list has now become long, with lethal synthetic colouring-say, metanil yellow to make turmeric, spices and pulses look fresh or red lead oxide to add shine to chilli powder, coloured sweets and pickles-taking its toll on the human body on prolonged use. "That's because of the tardy implementation of regulations and lack of stringent quality control exercised by the manufacturers of processed foods," says Ramesh V. Bhat, international food safety consultant and former head of the food toxicology division at the National Institute of Nutrition, Hyderabad. "Most of the state government food inspectors and lab analysts spend their time in courts, chasing pending cases," he says.
The infrastructure to check adulteration in the states remains woefully shabby. Take Uttar Pradesh, the biggest state in the country. It has just five public analyst labs: in Lucknow, Agra, Varanasi, Gorakhpur and Jhansi. They all date back to the 1980s and do not have the wherewithal to execute complex cases that need modern technology or adequate manpower. Two labs, in Gorakhpur and Jhansi, are running without a public analyst officer. The rest share one officer amongst themselves. About 430 posts of food inspectors are lying vacant, while technical manpower stands at just 40 per cent. The shortage tells its own story. Data from the Uttar Pradesh Food Safety and Drug Administration (FSDA) shows that just 30 per cent of 43,512 food samples sent to these labs got tested in 2014-15. A public analyst officer says on the condition of anonymity, "There is a rule that tests must be completed within 14 days. But now even the simplest cases take more than a month." Similarly in Rajasthan, about 73 food safety officers, working in just six testing labs, are supposed to execute at least 10 samples every month.

Wake up and smell the coffee

For the average urban Indian, food accounts for 50 per cent of the household budget. It's the biggest item of expenditure, reports the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (2014). Cereals and pulses top the list, followed by vegetables and fruits. Then come milk, meat, eggs, fish and edible oils. Snacks account for four per cent, with just one per cent being spent on noodles. The shock and anger over Maggi instant noodles is worth just that much. Beneath that, there's a cauldron of dangerous criminal activity that violates our rights to health and life with appalling disregard: fish contaminated with ammonia and formaldehyde, to preserve it just like dead bodies in a mortuary; farm animals contaminated with antibiotics to make them grow faster and keep them alive in the worst unsanitary conditions; fruits and vegetables coloured with copper sulphates and injected with hormone oxytocin to make them look fresh and inviting.

That's 49 per cent of the home economy down the drain, as we live at a higher risk every day. Yet there is no outrage, no controversy, not one complaint. Who is responsible for what is happening to our food? "The consumer," says Balvinder Bajwa, who witnesses, samples and quantifies in his lab every day what goes into our plate. "We want everything cheap. And there is a competition to pander to people like us. That leads to unfair trade practices." Be willing to pay a higher price for your health, he says. Insist ongetting your money's worth. Cut down the underhand operators. Support more inspection, enforcement, criminal prosecution.
To Narpinder Singh, it's the woefully low benchmarks we have as a nation that gets in the way: "India does not have a minimum standard requirement and database. We still use chemicals that were phased out in the US from the 1960s onwards. Our referral labs also don't always have state-of-the-art infrastructure and trained people. As a result, food manufacturers set their own standards and write whatever they want to write on the label," he explains. The solution to him is more control over monitoring of food material, both local raw material and those sourced from outside. "We need strict action on adulterers to set examples."
"We have studied about 200 packaged food products and found almost all of them either misreporting or under-reporting on their labels," says Suneeta Chandorkar. To her, mislabelling is a big offence because health is at stake: "We need stronger legislation and even stronger monitoring to stop this. We should ensure more random tests by accredited laboratories-both government and private-and the manufacturers shouldn't be told which lab the sample is going to." To Amit Khurana, consumers need to be more aware to protect themselves. "We should demand more transparency," he says. That manufacturers should list their contents loud and clear and the government should provide stringent regulation to control and monitor such labelling on food packs. "It is a consumer's right."
So take an interest in the store you buy your food from. Check it out: is it clean? Is it checked by food inspectors? Is the packaging intact? How about the sell-by date? Is there a use-by date too? Talk to people. Keep an eye out: is anybody falling sick after eating in a restaurant or buying from a shop? And speak out. Make a noise. Not just against multinational food giants but anyone who tries to decide for you what you should eat.