Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has released booklets on food adulteration to spread awareness about food adulteration and have also prepared lesson plan booklets for school students (grades 3 to 10) to detect adulteration of food.
Separate small booklets have been prepared by a team of experts for the students of class III - class X so that they can easily understand various ways to detect adulteration and impurities in their food.
This booklet can be downloaded from the Website of Eat Right School, FSSAI initiative adopted by the Government of India in the year 2016 to spread awareness about food safety amongst school children.
It has been released in varied size and content for students of different classes such as booklet released for class III contains 45 pages, the size of the booklets of class X students increases to 68 pages. It is more than self-awareness kit for students and they get to aware about adulteration and its evils, the book is replete with tests, experiments along with their manual procedures which the students can undertake to detect adulterated food.
Even team & food experts have factored in the need of trained teachers and school laboratories while preparing the coursebook as the lessons are detailed and need the infrastructure of a functional science lab. Apart from detailing the types of adulteration and its impact, the booklets consist of major laboratory tests to test the quality of various food products. For instance, the booklet for class III grades consists of tests to check the quality of food products like milk, egg, honey, pulses, salt, butter, ice-cream and each test is accompanied by a manual procedure to be adopted along with the various steps to be followed to ascertain the quality of the food products.
At the starting of the booklet, a note to teachers has also been appended along with general laboratory safety measures needs to be complied by both the students and teachers. While the initiative is appreciated by all students and teachers, even adults are who are devoid of any functional knowledge to test adulteration in various food products, the real success will only come if such experiments are conducted on a large scale in various schools spanning across different parts of the nation and every youth knows about it.
