Two-minute muddle

Should we encourage a first world response to food safety in a third-world country where there is no food safety anyway?

Apparently, Nestle is destroying 400 million packets of Maggi noodles. In terms of money that is about Rs 320 crore. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) banned the sale of Maggi because it found unacceptable levels of monosodium glutamate (MSG) and lead in it. It will take a month-and-a-half to destroy all available stocks of Maggi. Apparently, this queen of instant meals is now being used as fuel in cement industries.

Is it right to destroy so much food in the land of the hungry? Granted, not very healthy food, but food nevertheless — in a country where the poor do not have much access to wholesome, uncontaminated, FSSAI-approved food anyway. Where half-naked kids compete with hungry dogs and cows to rummage through garbage heaps for foodscraps that lie in our unsorted, unrecycled waste — picking up rotten fruit and out-of-date sauces and half-eaten rotis and mouldy bread from the dump of smelly rubbish, vegetable peel, discarded wrappers, mosquito repellents, nails, broken glass, discarded bottles of poisonous household cleaners and other incredibly dangerous, alarmingly toxic stuff.

Of course, we can click our tongue grimly — so sad, tch, tch! But what else can one do? Surely you cannot give food laden with lead to the poor? That would be criminal! They may be poor, but you cannot poison them!

Be patient, dear reader. We have all had Maggi noodles for years. It may have made us dumber — since lead poisoning affects the brain — but I doubt that it has been more harmful than the other food we eat and the water we drink. In the last few years, there have been several studies showing that the food we regard as healthy — like fruit, vegetables, milk and animal proteins — are actually brimming with heavy metals, toxins and hormones that no civilised country would allow into their food chain. Vegetable patches are regularly irrigated with waste water, like from sewage treatment plants, or with water contaminated by industrial effluents, and vegetables and fruit that grow on such soil are full of heavy metals like lead, cadmium, zinc, copper and nickel.

According to one study, 72 per cent of samples of spinach in Delhi contained unacceptable levels of lead, 24 per cent had more than twice the level permitted by the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act (PFA). Another study found all vegetables in parts of Varanasi to contain unacceptable levels of lead, cadmium, nickel and other dangerous heavy metals. In another study, 60 per cent of blood samples in Kolkata tested positive for lead poisoning. And 20 per cent of Kolkata’s children were suffering from it.

Our soil and water contain dangerous levels of lead and other heavy metals. Which is probably where Maggi got it from. Of course Nestle should be responsible, it should test its water and soil and make sure that their product is not loaded with lead. And of course there should be no MSG. Not surprisingly, Nestle says there have been many tests where neither have been found to cross acceptable levels. If so, why are they not sharing those test results with us?

Some years ago, I heard a couple of kids digging into a garbage heap and chanting the Maggi ad, “paanch rupay ka chhota Maggi!” I slipped them Rs 5 each, at which point one of them laughed out loud: “Arre koi toh banaa de mujhe... paanch rupay ka chhota Maggi! (Isn’t there someone who can make me a small five-rupee bowl of Maggi!)” If you were homeless you couldn’t eat even a five-rupee pack of noodles.

That changed very soon. Maggi shops sprung up everywhere. Roadside cooks sprung up to boil you some Maggi for a fee. It just took two minutes, after all. And it provided livelihoods to people in different ways.

If Maggi is harmful it must be stopped. But that can be done responsibly. One needs to stop the poison, not the industry — or industries — it has spawned. Robbing the poor of their livelihoods in an underemployed, poor country is mindless. Destroying Rs 320 crore worth of food — even if substandard — is wrong. There must be more tests, there must be a plan to ensure food safety. It must be done with thought. It cannot be an instant, two-minute decision.

Instead of hitting out at Maggi, and similar snacks, we need to figure out where the lead is coming from. What else is it contaminating? Go to the source, stop the contamination of foods, of our vegetables and spices and grains through the irresponsible dumping of toxic wastes.

Lead poisoning happens more routinely through the paint on our walls, the paint on children’s toys, cheap plastic utensils, cheap cosmetics. And the groundwater is routinely made unsafe due to lead contamination through polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipes. I don’t see any of these industries being targeted — the paint-makers, the toy makers, the PVC pipe makers. I don’t see the worshippers who immerse brightly painted idols of their gods into rivers and lakes, thus releasing more lead into the water, being told to stop. And most poor people go to quacks for their everyday health issues, since they cannot afford proper healthcare. These so-called doctors use heavy metals in ways that responsible ayurveda doesn’t — but do you see anyone policing them? The industries that poison us through dumping industrial wastes are not being targeted either. Only the ones that use that contaminated raw material are.

But we use contaminated vegetables and grains and spices too, at home. Should we ban our dal-roti-sabzi? Vegetables are full of heavy metal. Fruits are full of cancer-causing calcium carbide used as a ripening agent. Meats, milk, fruit and vegetables are full of hormones like oxytocin that causes anything from miscarriage and sterility to cancers and nerve trouble.

Honey is full of antibiotics that cause ulcers and resistance to antibiotics. Even bottled water and cold drinks have huge quantities of pesticide, going up to 70 times the permissible limit. All that is because of poisoned groundwater.

Let’s be sensible. If we are serious about our health, and the health of our children, we should stop lead poisoning at the source, not make dramatic gestures like destroying food that is low-quality but possibly not any worse than the vegetable soup and fresh fruits from your mother’s kitchen.

The writer is editor of The Little Magazine. She can be contacted at: sen@littlemag.com