Diksha Narang
PhD Scholar, South Asian University, Delhi. E-mail: diksha.narang12@gmail.com
Special Issue on Diseases, Death and Disorder, 2020
Abstract
In this paper, I analyze food scares in print and television news media. Food scares are crises when trust in the market is undermined. In the Indian context, the trope of adulteration regularizes anxiety as part of everyday life. The news media presents food in the urban marketplace as routinely faced with a crisis of adulteration. This ‘risky food’ is considered to lead to a slow and invisible accumulation of toxicity in the body. In the news media, a discourse emerges around chronic diseases and their uncontrollability and imperceptibility in city-spaces. Through food scares, the news produces itself as a watchdog, intermediary, and advisor to the consumer vis-a-visa questionable marketplace. Further, a dystopian reflection on the relationship between disease and city life emerges.
Keywords: adulteration, dystopian city, chronic diseases, news media.
Introduction
Food scares are events that involve a disruption in the provisioning system. In 2000-01, the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) or mad cow disease scare intensified in several parts of the world. In America, organic spinach saw an E. Coli breakout in 2006. Further, in 2008, the melamine scare in infant milk formula in China involving the Shijiazhuang-based Sanlu Corporation escalated into an estimated 54,000 babies being hospitalized with kidney stones (Tracy, 2010). In 2013, there was a scare in Europe that the beef being sold in the market was horsemeat. These are events in which the food supply is problematized as potentially poisonous rather than nourishing. Food scares are, therefore, critical events or crises when the blackboxing and bracketing of the food system is laid bare. They have been extensively studied as a means to understand institutional responses to the crisis, the emergence of regulations, and trade relations (Freidberg 2004). Food scares involve proscriptions around the consumption of certain commodities from the marketplace such as loose edible oil or places that sell commodities such as bazaars owing to accusations around adulteration. Food scares are most often, a mediated reality and the news media is both a site of representation and constitution of social reality.
In the Indian context food scares are presented as an everyday reality and persistent anxiety that the consumer faces in the urban marketplace. Therefore, rather than disruptive events, food scares are part of regular negotiations with risk. In the news media on food safety in India, ‘adulteration’ emerges as a central trope in which safety is considered to be compromised. Adulteration can be defined as,
. . . any act that renders an article other than of the nature, substance, and quality the purchaser is presumed to have expected. An article can no longer be regarded as adulterated if the representations made in regard to it are recognized and tell the whole truth. If represented as what it really is, it becomes a different article or another grade of the same commodity. Thus, under the terms of the United States Food and Drugs Authority, skim milk is adulterated milk, since a valuable ingredient cream has been removed. But it is regarded as another commodity, or as a grade of milk lower than unskimmed milk. (Alsberg 3)
Therefore, ‘skimmed’ milk may be the same in the constitution as adulterated milk, but adulterated milk is defined through its concealing of that truth, falsification, or misrepresentation. It is the divergence between the expectations of the consumer and the reality of the product that is only known to the producer. Adulterated foods are considered as invariably harmful and named as ‘slow poison’, ‘invisible risk’, and ‘silent killer’.
In the news media, adulteration often includes the addition of foreign material such as chalk powder in milk or the substitution of the components of a material like watering down of milk. This adulteration is also often described as the making of ‘fraud food’ such as plastic eggs, artificial rice, or synthetic milk made of urea, caustic soda, refined oil, and common detergents. Further, it is also related to the sophistication of material to increase their marketability such as copper polishing of green vegetables, wax polishing of apples, or growth hormone injections. These commodities are referred to as contaminated, adulterated, poisonous, artificial or colloquially, dooshith, milawat, or naqli. A contaminated food is routinely put on trial by the news media. These situations of ‘food on trial’ have been called hot situations, controversies, and food scares (Stassart & Whatmore 2003; Lupton 2000). The news media uses different modalities to make adulteration a perceptible reality to consumers such as sting operations, advice literature, and the popularization of scientific reports.
Invisible Poisoning of the Innocent Consumer
In South Asian urban studies, there is emerging literature in the field of medical anthropology that focuses on the association between urban life and illness (Cohen 1998; Alter 1992). This literature reports that for most informants, modern life in the city has symbolically and materially constituted as the cause of illness. In a similar light, Partha Chatterjee (1997) wrote a seminal essay titled, ‘Our Modernity’ in which he discusses the biography of Rajnarayan written in 1873. Rajnarayan was a Bengali social reformer who urged that the body (sarir) today is weak as compared to the glorious yesteryears of our ancestors. ‘Those days’ and ‘these days’ are defined through the degradation of our bodies. For Rajnarayan, modernity has side-effects and unfavourable consequences. Chatterjee (1997) interprets this as the experience of modernity in which there is a popular sense that modern life that has been adopted from the West is not suitable for us. In a similar light, Cohen (1998) writes that the popular association of illness and modernity identifies “four horsemen of the contemporary apocalypse” which are “modernization, industrialization, urbanization, and westernization.” Several illnesses such as depression, diabetes, cardiovascular disorders, obesity, infertility, and Alzheimer’s in both medical and popular discourse have been linked to these four ‘villains’ in the story of defective modernity.
This association of city, chronic disease, and the faulty marketplace can be illustrated through a food scare around artificial rice. In June 2017, there was a city-wide scare in Delhi that there was artificial, plastic, synthetic, or fake rice in the market[i]. On June 2nd, 2017, a woman named Kanta Adliya went to the famous Bengali Sweets restaurant in CR Park, Delhi where she alleged that she had been served plastic rice. She said that as soon as she was served the rice, she got a ‘plastic feeling’ from it. She called the Food Safety Department and various Hindi news channels such as News Nation[ii] and ABP news[iii] who reached to interview the aam-aadmi (common man) consumer who had been deceived by this ‘milawati’ (adulterated) market. News channels consequently debated whether this artificial rice would cause invisible poisoning in the body and unknowingly lead to hidden diseases like cancer. This state of being innocently affected by a callous and criminal marketplace is the affective center of the mediated public debate on food safety. Various slogans that are usually expressed at political protests then arise around consumption. For instance, in the Hindi news media “milawat ke khilaf halla bol” (rise against adulteration)[iv] is a frequent slogan.
In food scares, adulteration is conceived as affecting the middle-class man or the aamaadmi. In the news media, we see how public health is imagined as the city’s traders ‘stealing’ the health of middle-class consumer-citizens. For instance, in a Zeenews[v] news telecast titled, “why are fruits and vegetables in Delhi less in minerals?”, it is said that “dillike bazaar mein aap chamkdar se bkharede par kya aap ko pata hain kiin me protein kam hain. Dilli ke palaak mein Chennai ke palak se vitamin kam hain. Dilli ke ugayagayakhera, karela Chennai kesamnebekarhain. Kya vitamin aur protein gayabhain? Konyaha vitamin aurprotenchurarahehai?” (In Delhi’s bazaars you will find good-looking vegetables but did you know they are less in protein? The spinach of Delhi has less vitamins than the spinach of Chennai. The cucumbers, bitter gourd is nothing compared to what you find in Chennai. Are vitamins and proteins missing? Who is stealing the vitamins and proteins of Delhi?”) The moral panic in food scares comes from the violation of this innocence. In this way, the common man-consumer is framed through an ‘innocence of consumption’ which adulteration violates.
In the public debate around adulteration, this victimhood is mapped onto the object, metaphor, or symbolic medium of the body. Several diseases arise out of particular relations with consumption in popular perception. In the news media, diseases such as food poisoning result from eating at questionable street vendors who do not maintain personal hygiene. On the other hand, problems of overconsumption such as diabetes, heart diseases, and hypertension are popularly understood to result from a ‘greedy tongue’ or lack of self-control (Solomon, 2016). Diseases of adulteration, however, embed different metaphors and fields of meanings. Here, blame and responsibility are shifted away from the errant modern man but rather to the marketplace. The consumer who lives in Delhi is poisoned daily by how the city is provisioned. For instance, in the same Zee news telecast, it is also said that, “purane zamane mein agar kisiko murder karna hota to arsenic ka istmal hota – slow death keliye, apradhiko marne kiliye. Yaha arsenic ab apkobhi mil raha hain lekin apne koye apradh to nahe kiya. Apradh to yahe hain ki aap Dilli mein rahte hain.” (In the olden times, a criminal would be given arsenic to kill him – this was a slow death. Now, this arsenic is being given to you. And you didn’t do anything wrong apart from living in Delhi).
The victimhood of the consumer is expressed most clearly in the metaphors of slow and invisible poisoning of the body leading to the insidious accumulation of diseases such as cancer. This poisoning is not related to specific types of commodities such as sugar leading to diabetes, but rather is believed to be caused by processes of production. Chronic diseases in this urban imagination result from adulteration in the marketplace. Food’s origins and source, its manufacturing, and processing system, its transportation system create invisible residues on the body. The disease is described as emerging out of nowhere and with no involvement of the victim. Chronic diseases, death and urban food provisioning are attached and phrases such as, “tarboozmein moth ka injection” (death’s injection in watermelon)[vi], “cancer waladudh” (cancerous milk)[vii] or “cancer wali special thali” (cancerous food)[viii] are used. Arguments in the English and Hindi news media are put forth that the rates of cancer are ever-rising and people who have lived a healthy lifestyle without ‘smoking or drinking’ are falling sick because of the way that vegetables are produced and traded[ix]. The phrase that is often, used is ‘gharbetebete’ meaning ‘sitting at home’[x] and not doing anything wrong, one can still fall prey to chronic diseases. Further, the mystery of why people are falling sick is answered as emerging out of a faulty food way. Hidden-ness of the body’s illness is homologous to the secrecy and hidden-ness of the market. This further, indicates how the politics of food safety is expanding beyond hygiene in the sense of germs, hand washing, and so on towards the politics of invisible chemicals and what should be the normative composition of the food. The relationship between food and body is further, expanded to accommodate the slow action of chemicals and the possibility of chronic diseases.
Conclusion
The ‘common man’ in this enframing is defined as a victim of ignorance, cheating, or dishonesty. This victimhood is articulated through a notion of being unaware of their afflictions such as cancer, infertility, thyroid disorders, or accelerated aging. The aam aadmi is defined as being slowly poisoned by a food way characterized by gaps of knowledge. This is also a shift as Roy (2016) argues from the “deprived” to the “innocent” victim. Adulteration is a deceptive relationship between buyer and seller in which every buyer is a potential victim. In this politics of food safety, public health is deployed as a battle between the accumulation of private interests in terms of illegal profit of adulterating goods and robbing the health of innocent consumers.
In the case of food scares, the news media plays a constitutive role of enframing the disease. In a provocative statement by a television channel, the role of the news media in the politics of food safety can be summarized[xi], the television reporter asserts, “milawataurappke beech khadahuahai, ABP news” (in between adulteration and you, ABP news is standing). News articles on food safety argue that they are imparting awareness, consumer consciousness, and education. Since adulteration is primarily a relationship of deception, the news media engages inactions of ‘uncovering’ the deception. The news media positions itself as an ‘advice literature’, intermediary, or watchdog to the consumer with warnings about the malpractices of producers. The “modern, urban living can no longer be defined apart from the media experience” (Sundaram5). In representing the city, diseases are produced as part of a city-scape through a mediated reality.
However, the everyday scandals of adulteration reproduce allegories of a dark city. Sundaram (2009) argues that “the prominence of accident stories reflected a new form of writing and reporting about the city that emerged in the 1990s. By 2005, city news took on the same weight as national news. This reflected the growing predominance of urban discourse in the city. Narratives of consumption and spectacle co-existed with stories of death and disorder, sharpening the sensory experience of the growing metropolitan. The accident reporting coexisted with increasing stories of brutal murders of old couples and families” (Sundaram 147). While Sundaram (2009) talks about the “model of the accident”, there are metaphors of urban diseases and illnesses in dystopian news writing. This is not a breakdown in the sense of ‘accident’ but rather a civic breakdown because of greed and negligence. Just like the accident, it also leads to the death of innocent people and social disorder. The description of an aam aadmi consumer citizen who is a victim of a slow accumulation of chronic disease outside of his or her awareness shows how ‘deception’ is key to the connection among body, citizen, and city. Understanding cultural forms such as news media can alert us to the ways that aetiology is constituted in popular culture. Therefore, aetiology can be both popular, and political relating to blame, responsibility, and a vernacular moral order.
References
Alsberg, Carl L. “Economic aspects of adulteration and imitation.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 46.1 (1931): 1-33.
Alter, Joseph S. The wrestler’s body: identity and ideology in North India. Univ of California Press, 1992.
Cohen, Lawrence. No aging in India: Alzheimer’s, the bad family, and other modern things. Univ of California Press, 1998.
Freidberg, Susanne. French beans and food scares: Culture and commerce in an anxious age. Oxford University Press on Demand, 2004.
Lupton, Deborah. “Food, risk and subjectivity.” Health, Medicine, and Society: Key Theories, Future Agendas London: Routledge (2000): 205-18.
Roy, Srirupa. “Angry citizens: Civic anger and the politics of curative democracy in India.” Identities 23.3 (2016): 362-377.
Solomon, Harris. Metabolic living: food, fat, and the absorption of illness in India. Duke University Press, 2016.
Stassart, Pierre, and Sarah J. Whatmore. “Metabolising risk: food scares and the un/re-making of Belgian beef.” Environment and Planning A 35.3 (2003): 449-462.
Sundaram, Ravi. Pirate modernity: Delhi’s media urbanism. Routledge, 2009.
Tracy, Megan. “The mutability of melamine: A transductive account of a scandal (Respond to this article at http://www. therai. org. uk/at/debate).” Anthropology Today 26.6 (2010): 4-8.
Wilson, Caroline. “‘Eating, eating is always there’: food, consumerism and cardiovascular disease. Some evidence from Kerala, south India.” Anthropology & medicine 17.3 (2010): 261-275.
End Notes:
[i] This fear over ‘fake rice’ also perhaps, signifies a new moment of consumerism in which the consumers are vocal about what they want to consume. Siegel (2016) notes that in the post-independence national policy on attempting to promote self-reliance, there was a move to replace foreign imports. One way in which the Congress leadership sought this was through the development of synthetic rice or artificial rice by food technologists. Siegel quotes the nationalist agricultural scientists M Afzal Husain that “since chemists had produced rayon, nylon (and) plastics, there should be no reason why they cannot produce artificial rice from tuber starch.” The first artificial rice factory was established in Trivandarum.
[ii] News Nation. “News Nation Special: Fake Plastic Rice sold in several parts of India” June 8, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI-bQsISJDQ. (Last accessed 10 January 2019).
[iii] ABP News. “Delhi: Plastic rice which jumps like ball found in restaurant.” June 2, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeeJA1Xdo6s. (Last accessed 10 Januray 2019).
[iv] Jagran. Milawatkekhilafhallabol. October 16, 2017. https://www.jagran.com/editorial/nazariya-speak-attack-on-adulteration-16872307.html. (Last accessed 21 March 2019).
[v] ZeeNews. “Why are fruits and vegetables in Delhi are less in minerals?” May 23 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDKS7HICX84. (Last accessed 21 January 2019).
[vi] Zeenews. “Chemicals in fruits, vegetables – what they do to your body.” May 19 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43lE6e3rqeA&t=25s. (Last accessed 21 January 2019).
[vii] News24 Online. “Video: Beware! The milk that you are drinking will give you cancer.” Published without a date. https://news24online.com/news/video-beware-milk-you-are-drinking-will-give-you-cancer-9ca872da. (Last accessed 1 Febuary 2019).
[viii] Zeenews. “Cancer yatra: vegetables grown in dirty water causing various health diseases: Part 1.” September 7 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3TEMRQc3hE&t=66s. (Last accessed 10 January 2019).
[ix] Rao, Vishal. “I don’t smoke or drink, I eat well and exercise. How did I still get cancer? An oncologist answers.” The Better Indian. 4 February 2017. https://www.thebetterindia.com/85386/cancer/. (Last accessed 10 April 2019).
[x] For example, ABP news. “Delhi people are consuming poisonous vegetables.” May 29, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-TvgP618_c&t=1s. (Last accessed 21 January 2019).
[xi] ABP News. “This is how you can test Diwali sweets at your home.” October 26, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8i5dcMxrFs. (Last accessed 10 January 2019).
Diksha Narang is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the South Asian University, Delhi. This paper is based on her MPhil thesis titled, ‘Slow Poisoning: A Study of Food Scares in the News Media’ where she tried to trace the public debate around reforming food adulteration, crime and fraud. Her research interests include the everyday state and politics of knowledge.