God is in The Detail

Can the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India ensure safe and quality food at places of worship without hurting religious sentiments?

- Karnika Bahuguna

FAITH and reason seldom go together. While the latter remains open to debate, the former is too sacred to be touched. And the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) is soon going to get a taste of it. The country’s apex food regulatory body plans to implement the Food Safety Management System (FSMS) to ensure quality of food in places of worship (see ‘Making religion..., p25’). But the idea that something sacred needs to ascribe to external standards of purity is likely to make the implementation of FSMS a bumpy ride.

FSSAI stumbled upon one such bump in the last week of January, when the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD), managing trust of Tirupati temple in Andhra Pradesh, refused to allow the state’s food safety officers to inspect the temple kitchen. In August 2016, FSSAI asked the state’s food safety commissioner to take appropriate action on a complaint about unhygienic and unsafe practices during the preparation of prasad (edible religious offering) in the temple. Bengaluru-based RTI activist T Narasimha Murthy, who had filed the complaint, told Down To Earth (DTE): “Cooks who prepare laddoos in the Tirupati temple kitchen do not wear gloves, aprons or caps.” Media reports have in the past highlighted nuts, bolts and key chains being found in Tirupati temple laddoo, which has a Geographical Index tag indicating its uniqueness.

But TTD is adamant. In its response to the complaint, TTD says the laddoo is a sacred item and not food. It further says the prasad of Hindu temples is prepared as per customs and any intervention will potentially demean the feelings of Hindu pilgrims all over India. Since prasad is distributed at subsidised prices to pilgrims, it cannot be termed as goods for sale.