The Belly Rules the Mind.

Harish Mahesh
Sep 5, 2020
8 min read

Today I want to talk about something which I've touched upon a few times earlier, and something that we've known for quite a while- food safety and adulteration. I want to talk about what food safety is, how it is enforced, and most importantly what we as individuals and consumers can do to ensure that we and the future generations eat good food.

Let's begin by looking at what food safety is. Food safety is a set of practices followed to stop foodborne illness (food poisoning) and contamination. These practices could be on various levels- industry, market or consumer. Each of these levels would have a slightly different set of rules and regulations to ensure that the consumer, who is the terminal point of consumption, ends up getting good food to eat.

The core issue addressed here is food contamination. It could be:

Physical- dust, dirt, hair, microplastics, rodent faeces (yes, rat poo), etc.
Chemical- lead poison, mercury poison, preservatives, pesticides, agrochemicals, etc.
Biological- E-coli, Salmonella and other microbial contamination, etc.

All of the above mentioned are extremely likely in case of uncooked food. That is why washing fruits and vegetables before raw consumption is extremely important- especially right now, in the middle of a pandemic.

Each country or region has its own set of regulations that are enforced by the local authorities. Also, these regulations would depend on the nature of the food item, shelf life, ingredients, etc. For example, fresh fruits and vegetables have a short shelf life (at best about a week, if properly refrigerated) while nuts have a longer shelf life (months, and don't need refrigeration). So transporting fresh produce needs to be much more efficient and time-bound. The regional diet also plays a big role in deciding the food safety regulation. An average American consumes more than 125kg of meat per year, compared to an Indian who consumes less than 20kg per year. Therefore the regulations for preparation, handling, processing and storing meat will be very different.

To understand all this in brief, let's look at WHO's 5 key principles of food hygiene:

Keep clean- wash hands before touching any food item and eating it and clean any surface that comes into contact with food- vessels, plates, bowls, cutlery, etc.
Separate raw and cooked foods to prevent contaminating the cooked foods, and use different cutlery for cooked and raw food.
Cook foods for the appropriate length of time and at the appropriate temperature to kill pathogens.
Store food at the proper temperature.
Use safe water and safe raw materials.

These may sound very simple and obvious to begin with. And they truly are. Yet it is not practically possible to eliminate the risk of contamination of food, simply because of the way our supply chain is designed. Our food supply chain isn't designed to bring valuable, fresh and nutritious products to the consumer. It is only designed to minimize costs and maximize efficiency.

Efficiency is a good thing, except when it comes at the cost of resilience. One very relevant example is Smithfield. It's a meat processing company in the United States, and one of its factories in the state of South Dakota ended up being responsible for up to 55% of all the COVID-19 cases in that state. This is just one very simple isolated event, but it stresses the importance of food safety, and how some aspects of it are being compromised by existing supply chains.

You could argue that this was because of COVID-19 and that on a normal day without a pandemic, things would be normal and there would be no need to worry. That may be true to a very small extent. I say this because of the way industrial farming works, especially animal farms and slaughterhouses.

Animals are stacked close to one another to maximize the number of animals that can be handled at a given time. This means that the entire farm would be infected even if one animal is infected. But, farms have found a way to address this issue. These farms use a lot of antibiotics on animals to keep them all safe from diseases. This may be a good thing for the animals (from a disease-perspective) but not for us humans who consume the meat.

Scientists, in the 1940s, found that supplementing the animals' diets with antibiotics improved their growth rates. Farms took advantage of this and this resulted in shorter lifespans for many animals. While in 1957, a chicken that was 56 days old weighed less than 1kg, in 2005, the same 56 days old chicken weighed more than 4kg. I hope you understand what we're talking about here. Massive artificially induced growth of animals through antibiotics usage.

Why is this bad? It results in microbes developing resistance to the antibiotics, meaning that we need much higher doses of them to treat other outbreaks of the same pathogen. Not everyone can afford that. Besides, antibiotics have side effects like vomiting, nausea, diarrhoea, bloating, abdominal pain, etc. Although at current levels, it may be rare for a person to experience them, it could change for the worse in the future, if the usage of these antibiotics increases.

What can you do? I'd suggest that you stop eating meat because it's not only good for you but the planet too. But 9 out of 10 meat-eaters who would read this may not consider that. So the next suggestion would be to reduce your meat consumption. If you can't even do that, then at least stop supporting industrial farming of animals and turn towards smaller farms which are family-run businesses or community-level farms rather than large scale operations. Smaller-scale farms used to be a common thing in the past, and also, on paper, can reduce the likelihood of such diseases spreading around the whole farm. This means that we would flush out lesser quantities of antibiotics, and it all ultimately results in a much more resilient meat supply chain.

Food safety also has to do with crops. Usage of agrochemicals and preservatives has skyrocketed, which means that we could be ingesting a lot more of them than a few years ago. This is not a good thing because a lot of these chemicals are not only harmful to the environment but have adverse effects on our health.

One prominent example is a difficult-to-pronounce substance called TBHQ- tertiary butylhydroquinone. It is added in most fast food items due to its anti-oxidant properties. You may think that antioxidants are good. But this one is added because it extends the shelf life of the oily fatty food that comes from fast-food restaurants. Also, studies have indicated that chronic exposure to TBHQ may induce carcinogenicity. Another government designed study found that TBHQ increased the incidence of tumours in rats. So I'm going to leave the decision-making to you.

TBHQ is somewhere between food safety and adulteration. While food safety addresses the unintentional and accidental contamination of food, adulteration is intentional contamination food for greedy purposes. Reducing raw material consumption, increasing profits, improving the aesthetic look of the food item to draw more customers, etc. And it's not just fast food where adulteration is recorded. It's a slightly dystopian list of things that are found adulterated (reference #12):

Milk- adulterated with water, detergent, fat or urea
Tea leaves- adulterated with other leaves which may not even be edible
Coffee- adulterated with chicory, mustard or tamarind seeds, which could cause diarrhoea
Fruits and vegetables- adulterated with dyes to make them look fresh for longer, waxing of apples to extend shelf life, etc.
Sweets- the silver sheet we find on top of many Indian sweets could contain Aluminium. Worse is the sugar that could be used to prepare these sweets. Refined sugar as such does more harm than good. But sometimes the same sugar could be adulterated with tar dye, making things worse.

I could go on and on about this, but you get the idea. Luckily, these days, people are speaking out and companies are being held more and more accountable for their products and services. Take a look at these examples:

Burger King operator in China fined for using expired ingredients:

The restaurant decided to tamper with the labels of expiry dates to keep the food items in the shelf for longer than is permitted, attracting a hefty fine of $500,000.

Chipotle agrees to pay $25 million federal fine for role in some outbreaks:

This is an American fast-casual restaurant chain which came under scrutiny after becoming the origin of many illness outbreaks from 2015-2018 across various states.

Overall, in India alone, the number of such incidents involving lack of proper quality control, adulteration or counterfeit, have increased by around 20% despite the government pushing hard at the 'Make in India' campaign.

What can I do?

Growing microgreens or herbs at home:

Microgreens are extremely easy to grow at home and don't need much maintenance compared to other crops or plants. And many microgreens are superfoods for improving our health. This ensures a more reliable, trustworthy and transparent food supply chain. Even lettuce or other greens are easy to grow using hydroponics or aquaponics.

Buying from local farms:

If you live in the UAE and haven't checked out Al Badia farms or Emirates Hydroponics Farms, then it is high time you do. In short, they use technology to grow food locally, thereby resulting in fresh produce being delivered to the people in the UAE.

Transition to organic:

Organic is expensive. But it is also free of harmful chemicals or unnecessary things to worry about because it is organic. So while many of us may not be able to switch over to purchasing organic food, we could all surely include a bit of organic food in our diet. We may not be able to buy all fruits and vegetables from organic sources, but surely one or two could certainly be organic. We could all do what we can- that by itself is huge support shown to organic producers.

At last but not the least, I want to talk about the UAE government. I would personally vouch for the government pretty much any day because they've got some of the most stringent laws and regulations in just about any sector. Above that is their total lack of compromise. Random inspections are usually conducted across restaurants and food outlets to ensure that everything that happens follows the rules and regulations.

Recently the Dubai Municipality conducted around 10,000 inspections around Dubai in three months and closed 107 food outlets for violating hygiene and social distancing rules.

The UAE has something called the Food Code. It's a set of regulations and standards to be practised by all food outlets in the country. It is so detailed that it makes you question if anything can be missed out by the people who put it together. The UAE is not be the only country to have something like this, but simply looking at the index page of the official Food Code document makes you feel safe and secure. It is a very long document, but I do recommend reading through it- at least brushing through some pages. The link to the PDF is given below in the references section (reference #17).

There is a ton more to talk about concerning food safety and adulteration, but given how many of us may already be experiencing a lot of anxiety, I think that'll do for now. So with all this information about food safety, adulteration and whatnot, I hope that your next choice would be more conscious and well-informed because a conscious choice sends out a ripple-effect of messages to the industry to produce more responsibly.

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