food safety

Is junk food as hazardous as tobacco? The country’s regulator FSSAI seems to think so. In a draft regulation published by FSSAI dated October 30 2019, FSSAI has proposed that no person shall offer or expose for sale of pre-packaged foods which are referred to as foods high in fat, salt and sugar within 50m of a school campus, in addition to ensuring that the food served within the school campus be healthy. While this may be a timely move, when India has been ranked 2nd on child obesity, second only to China, the key lies in the implementation and…

In the spirit of what Benjamin Franklin once said – “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” – the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) released a draft notification on June 27 2019 seeking to place a mandate on packaged food companies to label high fat, high sugar and high salt content on the front of the package, using a traffic light signalling system. The overall objective is to let consumers make an informed choice. One of the most notable points in the draft rules relates to the Front-of-Pack (FoP) labelling; in particular, a ‘red-coloured’…

Clued in Indian travelers have often swooned over the variety of street food available in Kolkata. Even celebrity chefs, such as Gordon Ramsay, have talked and savoured street food in the City of Joy and it is not uncommon to find teams from international channels like BBC and CNN filming the food in the city. But a recent Taste of Travel survey conducted by Booking.com ** has brought Kolkata up in the ranks on India’s food map all over again. Kolkata was named the best city to explore mouth-watering street food followed by Amritsar, Ahmedabad, Mumbai and New Delhi. The research was…

“The recent scare due to the detection of formalin-laced fish across Goa, Kerala, Assam, Manipur, Nagaland and Meghalaya points to a link between water quality and food safety. Fish traders find it cost-effective to use formalin, a carcinogen, instead of ice to prevent the decomposition of fish during transportation to distant markets. Consumer confidence has been hit hard and fish producers are having a bad time due to the import ban on fish in most of these states,” says Satish Sinha, associate director, Toxics Link, an organisation working for environmental justice and freedom from toxins, at a public lecture held…