It’s the season to splurge on the good things of life, including food. However, before you loosen your belt and start on your festive bingeing, have a care. The lip-smacking foodstuffs that you tuck into — be it in a plush restaurant or a streetside fast food kiosk — rarely undergo any official quality checks. And if you do happen to fall ill after eating something, there is very little redress available to you.

Of course, on paper the Food Adulteration Act says that you can file a case against the offending eatery for selling impure or adulterated food. However, every citizen would rather have food adulteration nipped in the bud than go through the trouble of filing a case in the consumer court that could potentially drag on for years.

And it’s here that the negligence of the authorities is shocking. Take the Kolkata Municipal Corporation’s food inspection department. KMC’s food inspectors are supposed to carry out checks in the city’s eateries at regular intervals. They are tasked with looking into their cleanliness and hygiene and also checking whether the raw materials are fresh. The manufacturing dates and batch numbers of the spices and other packed food products are also supposed to be scanned.

If any kind of adulteration is suspected then the food sample is sealed and taken to the inspection lab for a test. If the sample is found to be adulterated, then a case against the eatery is filed with the metropolitan and municipal magistrate. The offending party may end up with imprisonment for six months to one year and a fine.

However, in reality, the KMC’s food inspection work is next to non-existent. There are only 26 food inspectors to cater to the huge number of eateries in Calcutta. Needless to say, they fall far short of the target of checking each one of them.

A look at some statistics tells the story. In the past three years KMC food inspectors collected only 766 samples — which means on an average each collected about 10 samples a year! What’s more, between 2006 and 2010, only 753 samples were analysed. The number of cases filed by the KMC between 2007 and 2010 was a paltry 104. Of these the municipal magistrate has so far ruled in just 12 cases. The number of convictions is even fewer — five. Seven were acquitted and 92 cases are still pending.

Even if an offender gets convicted by the municipal magistrate, he has the right to appeal to the high court. Incidentally, the Calcutta High Court has not convicted a single person for food adultery or other related offences in the last five years.

Member, mayor-in-council, Partha Pratim Hazari, admits that his department has too few men and too meagre resources to keep an effective vigil on the quality of food served in Calcutta’s restaurants. Adds KMC food superintendent Susanta Kumar Ray, “Our food testing laboratory has only three analysts. This forces us to bring down the number of food samples collected every day.”

The KMC’s food testing lab lacks the facility to analyse if meat or fish is fresh or rotten or indeed if dog meat is being sold in the name of mutton.

Hazari bemoans the lack of adequate manpower in his department. “I do not know how this department will function effectively with almost no manpower and infrastructure. If any mass scale hazard takes place we won’t be able to do anything at all.”

Of course, restaurant owners and managers claim they maintain high hygiene standards anyway — with or without KMC’s food inspectors. “Anybody can enter our kitchen anytime to check,” says Kallol Banerjee, manager, Marco Polo, a restaurant in south Calcutta. Siddhartha Bose, director of the Bengali eatery chain Bhojohori Manna, too insists that they do their utmost to maintain strict standards in quality. “We have an in-house ‘inspector’ who ensures highest quality and processes,” says Bose.

But what of the street food vendors? Who ensures that they maintain minimum standards of health and hygiene? “As the street food vendors have no registration number, billing system or permanent address, they remain outside the purview of any law,” says a food inspector. So, there is nothing that can be done apart from public awareness campaigns that are carried out from time to time.

State consumer minister Sadhan Pande offers his own solution to the problem. “The government can’t do away with street food as thousands of poor people make a living out of it. But one can avoid street food — and if there is no demand for it, the problem will be solved automatically.”

Sweets are another area of concern as many of them are made with suspect ingredients. “Most of them use unpermitted artificial colours and flavours and do not maintain hygiene,” asserts Mala Banerjee, president, Consumer Forums Association.

Naturally, one cannot tar all sweet shops with the same brush. As Dhiman Das, director, K.C. Das, claims, “Our rosogollas are completely machine made, starting from kneading to the final product on the tray. In cases of other sweets too we maintain the highest degree of hygiene”. But even he admits, “I really don’t remember when was the last time that our shop or factory was visited by food inspectors.”

If you do fall ill after consuming food that you feel may be rotten or adulterated, you can take legal steps against the eatery concerned. Take care to preserve the cash memo, and if possible, pack the suspect food and submit it, along with the cash memo to the consumer court. You also need to get a certificate from a doctor saying that you developed food poisoning. “But it is a very difficult and a long-term affair to pursue a case against an eatery,” says consumer lawyer Prasanta Banerjee. “In fact, such cases have been few and far between. And judgments against offending restaurants are also extremely rare.”

In sum, when it comes to eating out, you have to rely on the goodwill of the restaurant, and keep your fingers firmly crossed.