The heat’s on for Lahore’s kitchens
“Do you bury the dead here?” Aysha Mumtaz once asked a restaurant owner when opening his freezer.
Here in the “food capital of Pakistan,” restaurant owners have started referring to Aysha Mumtaz as the toughest lady in town. But sometimes even Mumtaz, the head of the city’s newly empowered food inspection office, can only laugh over how gross her job really is.
Escorted around Pakistan’s second-largest city with an armed guard, Mumtaz is on the front line of the country’s latest war: trying to clean up restaurants that can be rife with stomach-churning viruses and bacteria. Mumtaz and her 22-member team have been storming into restaurants, hotels, tea stalls and food warehouses in a highly public campaign to change how food is stored, prepared and served in a country that has a reputation for being one of the world’s most unhealthy places.
“Look at these dirty clothes hanging right over the food you plan to serve,” Mumtaz yelled recently at a restaurant owner, pointing to a soiled shalwar kameez hanging near freshly prepared badana, a local sweet, that was piled on the floor.
Then Mumtaz opened the freezer, caked in black ice, and began laughing at the rancid sight. “You are keeping bricks in the freezer next to the potato salad?” Mumtaz asked. “And look at this mildew and mould . . . Do you bury the dead in here?”
The restaurant owner pleaded for forgiveness. But sympathy is hard to come by as the country tries to get serious about one of its biggest killers. Pakistan is home to all sorts of food-borne illnesses. Mass food poisoning is common, and more than 100,000 children younger than 5 die of diarrhea-related illnesses annually.
Since Mumtaz took over as director of operations for the Punjab Food Authority in June, she and her employees have carried out more than 12,150 inspections here in Lahore, where there are about 40,000 restaurants, food carts and tea stalls. Nearly 1,000 of those eateries have been sealed while more than 375 people have been arrested for being grossly negligent, Punjab officials said.
When the Punjab Food Authority started its campaign this year, Mumtaz said she quickly found that, like many aspects of life here, the selling of food is steeped in Pakistan’s classist traditions. All too often, she says, wealthy business owners couldn’t care less what the poor and middle class eat.
Over the summer, the Punjab Food Authority began documenting its findings on Facebook, complete with unsettling photographs. Within weeks, the page had 300,000 “likes” in this city of about six million residents.
Mumtaz, who had no experience in food safety until she took this job, has been called “Dabangg” — which in Urdu means fearless — by some residents. But going up against Lahore’s politically connected restaurant industry hasn’t been easy. In September, the Lahore Hotels and Restaurants Association won a court ruling barring the agency from sharing videos and pictures of its raids on Facebook until a defendant “is found guilty by a court.”
It’s not surprising that Mumtaz is not keen on dining out in Lahore anytime soon.
“I prefer to eat my things at home.”