Ensuring food safety

If foods manufactured industrially have to maintain a certain quality, those prepared in kitchens of restaurants or hotels cannot claim maintenance of an acceptable standard. Sure enough, not all units of the food industry are particular about complying with best practices and official regulations. Then there are low category manufacturers which compromise on ingredients used in foods and beverages mostly deliberately in order to maximise profits. In the absence of regular monitoring such companies can go away with their malpractices. When consumption of such low quality foods or drinks lead to serious health problems of children or adults, people in authority sit up and go for the rhetoric mostly to pacify protesting people. Even reputed brands of soft drinks exposed their failure to maintain standard when algae and other foreign substances were found in their sealed bottles. Similarly, a front-ranking bakery was fined Tk 1,800,000 for mixing the returned stale cakes and pastry in fresh dough.

When such is the measure of business honesty of reputed manufacturers and food companies, is not it too much to expect that foods, sweetmeat and bakery or fast food chains will serve quality foods and prepare those hygienically on a daily basis? A roundtable on "Drive against food adulteration: Institutional crisis" has sought ways and means to bringing a change in the situation. No doubt the motive is laudable but the challenge is stupendously daunting. The food minister is all for grading the hotels and restaurants in Motijheel area in order to compel them to improve their standard. He disclosed that the Safe Food Authority is studying 200 restaurants there. According to him, the best food processors will be placed in green zone, the better ones in the yellow zone and the bad ones in the red zone. The lower two categories will be given a certain time limit to improve their quality and graduate for the green zone. Those which fail to mend their ways will be sealed off.

One wonders if this is enough to ensure safe food for consumers. There are certain things that need to be taken care of if the quality of foods has to be improved. Ingredients of foods have to be unadulterated and uncontaminated. Even if spices produced by spice companies are adulterated, it can have terrible effect on consumers who eat foods prepared by those. Similarly, if vegetables are plucked within a short time of insecticide application on those can be dangerous for human consumption. So the supply line has to be unadulterated and uncontaminated by chemical pesticides.

Last but not least, it is those people behind food preparation who also matter. Unless they are well trained in catering services, they may prove a misfit in the business. They will not be equal to the task of maintaining the standard in demand. Employees hired raw from villages for serving at low standard hotels and restaurants are not expected to know what hygiene means and best practices are in handling foods. So there is a need for imparting extensive training for hotel and restaurant employees.