OUT of the millions of stories about food that originate in Lahore, only a few focus on the less flattering aspect: the rules that cooks and confectioners here don’t follow while creating their hailed delicacies. Often, the stories that highlight the unhygienic side of the food business in the city exist on the margins of our collective knowledge, their presence in the mainstream being a recent thing.

Many of us are familiar with the story of the rat that found itself a safe haven inside a branch of one of the most popular bakeries in Lahore. The sight of the rodent had drawn all kinds of sighs — from those of horror to vindictive ones — with its command over territory and its choice of the food items at its disposal. For many months, continuously, it held the attention of the social media audience. It can still be called upon from the archives as perhaps the most effective method to put an enthusiast off baked stuff or put him on to some ‘healthier’, invariably more expensive, option.

Apart from what appeared on the social media and in horrified conversations about the lack of cleanliness in the food business in the Punjab capital, very little negative information found its way into the mainstream media. When there was a news item about some action by a government team against a restaurant etc not maintaining proper hygienic standards, the subject would go unnamed. Exceptions apart, the newspapers would confine themselves to reporting that ‘an’ eatery had been raided and punished for faltering on quality — which, as the nondiscriminatory umbrella of anonymity works, would earn a bad name for many others than just the outlet in question.

Many of us are familiar with the story of the rat that found itself a safe haven inside a branch of one of the most popular bakeries in Lahore.

In more recent times, whereas some hesitancy in naming and shaming is still there, it has not been all that unusual to nominate a culprit in the mainstream media. The information has been too frequent for everyone to maintain the old cover of secrecy — borne out of responsibility to not ‘unduly’ defame a respected business. The main source is the Punjab Food Authority that, armed among other things with a camera that records all details about a raid, has been able to carry out its work with openness and energy.

The authority was established under a 2011 act and for the time being its working is limited to Lahore. It works through the offices of the food security officers (FSOs) employed in the nine towns of Lahore and has been much in the news for its raids on even exalted places that at one point in time might have appeared too high for a government official to poke their nose into. The authority has been, visibly, one of the busiest official agencies, creating fear not just among the makers of food, but also their clientele wishing not to find their favourite outlets in the growing pile of those who have had the ignominy of having their business sealed or their staff arrested for not doing a clean enough job of it.

The efficient authority has come up with some disastrous results in contrast to all that pride which is forever at display in discussions about Lahore’s rich eating tradition. Not that the facts about lowly standards were hidden from anyone, but the food authority is a little more insistent than the district government officials who were earlier assigned the job in pointing out not just an odd instance but a relentless series of them. One natural consequence of its high-keyed working is that the consumer is increasingly been denied the security cover where he or she instinctively clings to the belief that violations of standards were not common enough to affect one.

The scope of the exercise and its expanse is impressive. In recent days, FSOs have been found prowling around a famous burger shop which perhaps thought that a little extra tanginess in a sachet of ‘expired’ ketchup would be taken as a mark of the brand. The place was sealed and while it escaped too wide a mention in the media, perhaps because of the awe it struck in everyone’s heart due to its foreign credentials, a local impersonator was not that lucky. It not only got grilled for the terrifying filth that it had collected in its kitchen, it found its name plastered in popular memory all over town in quick time.

For an idea of what impact the sealing of the local chain had on consumers, it was illustrative to follow a chat among a group of teenagers. They were pretty sure they didn’t want to visit the shop ever again and were quite insistent on eating out only in places which had cooking places which ‘we could see’ or were allowed to see on request.

From other conversations, it is quite clear that this is something that needs to be sustained and turned into a permanent campaign. There is so much room for filth to collect in the business and there is always this tendency to glamorise, glorify the business of food, the unclean parts of it quite often wrapped in tradition in order to escape discreet inquiry.

Even the frequent Punjab Food Authority raids splashed in the media are sometimes dubbed as unnecessary, and not only by those in the food business and those inclined to mistake the unhygienic for desirably messy. The funniest remark that one has heard is about a woman food security officer, one of the four such women officers working with the Lahore towns. The remark spoke of her as being unnecessarily strict — ‘like women officials’ — and unforgiving and unflinching.

This is one statement the men working as the food security officers must be contesting. They must not appear any less vigilant and uncompromising than their colleagues over something as urgent and serious as this. Together they must ensure that these stories about their advances are not overtaken by the tales of wilful omissions.

The writer is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore.

Published in Dawn, July 10th, 2015

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