Practice of using metanil yellow as food colour to process food in unorganized sector of West Bengal - A case study

Headnote

Article history

Received: 13 June 2014

Received in revised form:

9 January 2015

Accepted: 12 January 2015

Keywords

Metanil yellow

Turmeric powder

Ladoo

Besan

Food adulteration

Abstract

We report here about the practice of using metanil yellow, a non permitted synthetic dye, in the adulteration of some food items produced by the organized and unorganized sectors located in different districts in West Bengal, India. We considered three food items- turmeric powder, ladoo and besan for the detection of the presence of metanil yellow. We observed that 58 of the 253 samples i.e. 20.94% of total samples contain metanil yellow in which 36.21% of the positive samples contained the metanil yellow below the maximum permissible limit i.e., below the 100 mg kg-1 food samples and 63.79% of the positive samples contained above the maximum permissible limit i.e., above the 100 mg kg-1 food samples as specified in the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act of India (PFA, 2008). We observed insignificant presence of metanil yellow in besan samples. We did not observe significant presence of metanil yellow in the same food samples collected from the organized sectors. We also found that all the positive samples i.e., the samples containing significant amount of metanil yellow were prepared from the food items collected from the unorganized sectors. From the study it is concluded that the unorganized sectors practice to use metanil yellow indiscriminately to adulterate the food items. We suggest strict governmental vigilance to prevent food adulteration with metanil yellow to avoid human health hazards.

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Introduction

Some organized and unorganized sectors in West Bengal state of India are engaged in food processing activities. Interestingly, the unorganized sectors have flourished more rapidly than the organized sectors with the increase in demands of cheap available foods due to unprecedented population growth in West Bengal since the last few decades. It has been studied that both the organized and unorganized sectors use different kinds of synthetic colours to process some food items like ladoo, besan, orange or yellow colored sweets (amrity), ice cream etc. and spices mainly turmeric powder. Majority of synthetic food colours are highly toxic synthetic chemicals and banned by the central and state administration. The organized sectors generally follow the permissible limits as stated...