Eat and die

The death of two children in Karachi after eating at a popular restaurant and then having sweets at a roadside vendor have once again put into question the role of the government in monitoring the quality of food served to the public.

While the police try to solve the riddle of the deaths of the two children, one must question the role played by the Sindh Food Authority, which otherwise seems to lie dormant as restaurants and food sellers seem to sell whatever they want.



The facts of this ill-fated case are as follows. A family had dined out at a high-end restaurant, located on Zamzama Boulevard, in DHA Phase V, Karachi, and had later consumed candy from a shop outside an amusement facility on Sea View. The children and their mother reached home around 2am. Their health deteriorated at around 6am, but they did not reach the hospital until after 1pm the next day.

Both children had complained of stomach aches and had vomited. It was at this point that their mother, who had also taken ill, decided to go to the hospital. Unfortunately, one of the children passed away en route to the hospital while the other died during treatment. One can only wonder what they ate.

The Sindh Food Authority (SFA) claimed to have found expired meat products from a warehouse that they said was being used to store the inventory of the restaurant where the children ate.

The restaurant has been sealed. It seems the biggest discovery by the police has been that meat found to have been imported in 2014 and according to the inscription on the packets and supposed to have been used by February 2015 was being served to patrons.

Further investigations reveal that it may have been the milk that the family drank after coming back home that may have been the cause of death. Samples taken by the police have been sent to different laboratories but so far there has been no conclusive evidence to blame one or the other.

In all this, one question remains: where was the Sindh Food Authority all this time? It seems that for most parts this body remains dormant, springing into action only when such tragic incidents happen.

If one looks at its previous record, its officials seem more interested in settling the case and not doing their job. We have all forgotten the case of thirteen-year-old Kinza, who died of food poisoning after eating a burger from a well-known shop in North Nazimabad.

Kinza, her mother Dr Shazia and two siblings, Noman and Shayan, ate burgers from the fast food joint and after eating the burgers, the four fell sick and were admitted to Ziauddin Hospital, where Kinza died during treatment. Nothing came about of the case and the police buried it. A TV personality was hired by the fast food joint to protect their image and that made it more difficult to seek justice.

How long can we continue like this? The Sindh Food Authority itself should be put in the dock to explain how the restaurant in question was serving burger patties well past their expiry dates. Does the authority not have the mandate to check what restaurants are serving?

Why do we have to wait for the death of innocent members of the public to get the food authority to spring into action. It is time for us to examine more carefully how and what we are served at restaurants and public places in the name of food.

Various news reports suggest that much of what we eat at public places and restaurants is not fit for human consumption. The focus of the authorities remains on some of the high- profile international chains when its attention should be on the local food vendors and restaurants.



Inspectors usually end up lining their pockets instead. There is no accountability on the performance of the relevant departments as we saw in the Kinza case. After the initial hue and cry, the matter was hushed up and the police and the relevant government department made money.

How long would it take for our leaders to wake up to this? In Punjab, things are much better. What is happening in the other provinces?

Published in The Express Tribune, November 19^th, 2018.

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