Why Food Safety and Standards Authority of India is giving hell to restaurants
With the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) spreading terror in the industry, so much so that even food processing industries minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal has recently spoken up against what she describes as a "fear psychosis", a nudge-nudge-wink-wink economy of products banned by the FSSAI had started thriving over the past year.
Hoteliers and restaurateurs keep complaining about the steep spike in prices of ingredients such as Japanese rice vinegar, about which the FSSAI "aren't amused", but they have no option but to buy these essentials from the grey market to keep themselves in business. Imagine sushi without rice vinegar!
The days of the underground party seem to be numbered now, with the country's food safety commissars issuing a diktat a couple of weeks ago making the person(s) or company running a food business operation liable for any lapse in compliance to the FSSAI regulations. Hotels and restaurants, in other words, will soon have to set up departments devoted to FSSAI matters and also chuck away all ingredients considered unpalatable by the agency. They can't any longer get away by saying that they had bought their stocks in good faith from their suppliers. If that means making sushi without Japanese rice vinegar, so be it.
The answer of the FSSAI bureaucrats to any question relating to the rationale behind a ban is that "no one will die because of it". The issue here is not if a particular food product is essential to human survival. What is at stake here is the right of every human being to choose what he or she eats without being told what to do by state-appointed commissars. If Indians can eat the famous Italian cheese, Grana Padana, or savour slices of Parma ham in their pasta, or dig smoked salmon in their afternoon sandwich anywhere in the world, what makes these products so bad when they land on Indian shores? Why should we be denied the pleasure of eating with the rest of the world?
There's absolutely no rationale dictating the FSSAI's list of banned food products. In the aftermath of the Maggi episode, in fact, the agency has come under a cloud of allegations of malfeasance levelled against it by its own former directors, including the one who gave India's favourite snack its FSSAI certification. Its sense of judgement is being questioned as well, now that nine countries, including the normally fastidious Canada and Singapore, have tested Maggi noodles afresh and given it their regulatory green signals.
The man leading the charge against the FSSAI as convener of the Forum of Indian Food Importers, Amit Lohani, can cite example after example of the agency's arbitrary standards. Take olives. The FSSAI has a problem with the pH level of the brine in which olives are packaged. What it doesn't realise is the standards on which its objection is based are outdated because of the advances made in pasteurisation techniques around the world.
It is the same reliance on outdated standards that leads to anomalies such as the FSSAI allowing imports of corned beef, but banning Parma ham. The import of corned beef was first okayed by the British administration in India during WWII for the nutrition of the US and Australian soldiers stationed in the country. Standards for corned beef, as a result, exist in the statute books, but not for Parma ham.
The FSSAI's standards are also responsible for a host of products consumed all over the world, from the popular sea salt and caramel sauce of Starbucks to Hershey's Ice Breakers mouth-freshening mints, being denied to Indian consumers. And now a new irritant is simmering down under in the form of wine standards. The FSSAI is setting the standards in consultation with a lobbying group for the alcohol industry, but the wine industry has been kept out of the process. Like everything the agency does, this too shall remain a mystery.