The aloo wars of 2005 are now barely remembered, but for a brief while, the question of whether Indian potatoes were infected or not became a cross-border issue.
Pakistan quarantined the Indian aloo in September 2005 as part of a larger vegetable skirmish, but after a barrage of virus tests and some discreet diplomacy, the offending potatoes were finally allowed to cross the Wagah border.
In 2005, the health risks of vegetables were just about becoming part of mainstream concern — they took a back seat to the rampant scare stories caused by the spread of mad cow disease. Western markets worried far more about salmonella and e coli outbreaks, though in India many activists had begun to discuss the risks of pesticides in vegetables. But given debates over poor slaughterhouse conditions and concerns over bird flu, vegetables took a back seat to headlines that spoke of thousands of chickens and ducks being slaughtered in Tripura.
Most of our vegetable battles have either been very specific — the debate over BT brinjal and GM foods, for instance, which is an ongoing and complex one — or media-driven scares. There’s a brief period when people stop eating spinach, or brinjal, and then the conversation moves on.
But perhaps we should be paying more attention to the veggies on our plate. In a way, many of us do, but we internalise the debates. Many Delhi oldtimers won’t buy or eat watermelon; the images of watermelons grown in the toxic, pollution-laden waters of the Yamuna are very sharp, even though toxic watermelon may well be just as safe or unsafe as other fruits, as I’ll explain.
The recent e coli outbreaks in Europe offer a sense of how food safety norms have shifted from fears of contaminated meat and fish to fears of vegetables, often contaminated by the infected run-off from cattle or sheep grazing nearby. In the last few years, the culprit in many of the e coli scares in the West has not been meat — Spanish cucumbers, Californian spinach, and, most recently, Egyptian fenugreek sprouts have been to blame.
What is more alarming for Indians is that every independent study of Indian vegetables confirms that they contain unusually high levels of pesticides. Studies done by Consumer Voice and by the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture reveal a wide range of chemically dangerous substances in vegetables from cauliflower to bitter gourd, spinach and parwal, including malathion, chlordane and DDT. The amounts in which Indians ingest pesticide in their vegetables, grains, cereals and spices are significantly higher than, say, most EU citizens, in part because the laws governing the use of pesticides in the country haven’t been updated for 30 years.
This is not new information, though it’s buttressed by new studies. But it’s surprising how little discussion we have of these issues in the public domain, and how few studies have looked at the health effects on Indians who’ve now been consuming pesticides in vast amounts for at least a 10-15 year period. Another outbreak of food hysteria wouldn’t be of much use — as the wide range of vegetables and cereals affected shows, this is not a problem you can deal with by abjuring aubergines, so to speak. Nor can more than a small section of consumers afford to switch over to eating organic veggies, setting aside the confusion over what constitutes organically-farmed vegetables in India.
What we really need is a much more focused public debate on food safety.
“Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are,” Brillat-Savarin famously wrote. That, in today’s world, is a very alarming offer.
Nilanajana S Roy is a Delhi-based writer
