Safe food drive

School children buying foods from hawkers is a common sight. Why isn't the government taking action against these street hawkers? Why do we find magistrates only in food outlets where they can charge huge fines?

If food turns out to be life threatening, then we have everything to be worried about. Since the independence of this country, there has been no effective anti-adulteration drive to probe deep into the standard of various foods served in the hotels and restaurants, and sold in the markets. Often there is no expiry date or production date written on the packets of foods that are openly sold in the markets. The customers usually do not notice it most of the time and become victims of deception. Besides, a large part of our population is still illiterate and do not care about it. Then the picture of the hotels and restaurants and fast food shops, which have recently been brought to light with the help of mobile courts, has panicked us. Almost all the restaurants along with the famous ones serve stale and rotten foods to the customers who eat these foods in good faith. What is more important is that they use toxic and deadly chemicals in foods and prepare them in an unhygienic environment.

Thus we are being exposed to many lethal and incurable diseases like nervous breakdown, cancer etc.

Ramprashad Banik, Jahangirnagar University

It may sound quite strange to many that mothers also serve adulterated foods to their beloved ones. But how? Well, mothers may prepare food items in their clean and hygienic kitchen, but what about the ingredients with which they prepare their so-called home-made 'pure and fresh' foods. These everyday ingredients, such as edible oil, flour, milk powder, condensed milk, salt, tea, noodles etc, mothers can't produce in their houses and have to buy these ingredients from markets and then comes the question whether they are pure or not. So we may be the victims of food adulteration even in our houses. It will be useless to raid only in restaurants and shops as they have to use sub-standard raw materials to produce their items since there is no standard raw materials in the markets. One may argue that there are both 'number 1 (pure)' and 'number 2 (impure)' raw materials available in markets but the food producers prefer 'number 2' to profit more.

But the fact is that there is no 'number 1 (pure)' item in the market at all as we common people think. This idea has been invented only to cheat the consumers.

J Swift Chittagong