Behind the kitchens

Ever wondered why it takes USAID, DFID or other international development organisations to tell us that education is important and good sanitation a necessity? Why is it that we can’t understand such basic things ourselves? How hard is it to ask and be provided with quality standards when it comes to things that we eat? Poverty is not the lack of money — it is the lack of conscience to demand, practice and attain a better living.

For years, Pakistan’s food industry has been thriving. And not only in major cities like Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad or Peshawar — the culture of eating out has grown exponentially over the past decade or so even in smaller cities and towns all across the country. One only has to drive through GT Road to observe a restaurant every 100 metres. Yet, there has been no authority to maintain a quality check or monitor the practices of such thriving businesses. In most cases, the restaurant owners, in the pursuit of maximising profits, have compromised on health, cleanliness and quality of the products used to prepare the food. The result? Millions of people end up hospitalised with food-related diseases every year.

But then the Punjab Food Authority (PFA) happened. Under its flamboyant civil servant, Ayesha Mumtaz, the PFA exposed the recklessness and disturbing reality of kitchens and the use of expired products in restaurants. It didn’t come as a surprise to most people; many already knew that restaurants operate under disgusting conditions — however, for many all that mattered was the ‘taste’. Driven by our taste buds, food poisoning and Hepatitis A have been a problem widely accepted as an inevitable consequence of eating out. But why have we let ourselves get used to low quality products when we are paying full price? Perhaps, it’s the lack of faith in the system that leads us to believe that nothing could stop the menace of adulterated products, thus lowering our expectations.

It’s only when the PFA stepped up its activity that what many thought couldn’t ever happen, started happening: raids on high-profile international fast food chains and major hotels. Pictures of kitchens in frequently visited restaurants, charging customers exorbitant rates, expose a disturbing reality: poor cooking conditions, expired products, toilets being used as food storage and the list goes on. Sheer negligence on the part of restaurants, bakeries and food producers may be hospitalising and killing more people every day than smoking and terrorism combined. Yet, there are no calls or demands to the government from civil society to regulate the industry. If anything, the move to regulate and monitor came from the provincial government itself, which set out to crack down on restaurants and food processing units involved in selling unhygienic and low-grade food products.

As such, the PFA is fast becoming an extraordinary case study of ‘change’ — how one government department can bring about transformational changes on the ground if it has active leadership, makes good use of social media, and most importantly, has the full support of the political leadership. The PFA’s model demonstrates that real change need not necessarily require dharnas or overthrow of governments — instead we need baseline institutional reforms that can put the right people to work, fixing every industry one step at a time.

While the PFA is showing remarkable performance, the real success would be to applied this model to other major sectors starting from health — monitoring the conditions of hospitals, and then moving on to education, as well as the automobile industry where consumers are made to buy overpriced Japanese cars that fail safety and road tests by all international standards. We don’t need to be a First World, high income, developed country to regulate our markets and industry or demand better quality for our buck. What we need is awareness and an educated approach to demand quality, which is our basic right. Development and progress will follow when we start talking about the right issues and asking the right questions.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 11^th,  2015.

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