Do noodles contain eggs? What about ice creams? Is the gelatin in jelly crystals of animal origin? Could instant soup packets contain non-vegetarian extract? Such questions have resurfaced after fast foods company McDonald's agreed in March to pay $10 million as damages to vegetarians in the US for flavouring french fries with beef extract.

Even tea manufacturers were legally allowed to use "flavouring substances" of animal origin till the Indian Government proposed an amendment to the Prevention of Food Adulteration (PFA) Act in August 2000.

A year ago, the Ministry of Health notification on the amended PFA Act decreed that from October 4, 2001 food products containing "whole or part of any animal including birds, fresh water or marine animals or eggs, but not including milk or milk products as an ingredient, will have to display on the packet, a symbol consisting of a brown dot inside a square with a brown outline".

However, check the supermarket shelves and you will find more confusion than compliance. Rex jelly lists gelatin as "of animal origin" among the ingredients but carries no symbol. Custard powder packets carry no symbol either. Likewise, Weikfield jelly carries no symbol (though it is labelled "100 per cent vegetarian").

Some noodle packets, manufactured after October 2001, carry the defunct circle-with-a-diagonal-red-line symbol (proposed earlier, to denote "non-vegetarian" but superseded now by the new symbol) while some marked "chicken" carry no symbol (the idea in making a symbol mandatory was to facilitate easy identification for buyers). Most products merely list "added flavour" without giving details (which bothers buyers, in the wake of the McDonald's "flavour" controversy).

What's more, even a leading 100-year-old outlet like Nilgiris (in Bangalore) declared, when asked by a customer whether the green-dot-in-a-square symbol on a pasta packet meant it was "pure vegetarian", that it was "just a design, signifying nothing".

A classic example of how we merrily add laws for consumers' benefit without bothering about follow-up or monitoring for compliance?

-Sakuntala Narasimhan

Wedded to Law

HYDERABAD: Divorced by a marriage law

It's bad news for wicked old Arabs who come shopping for poor little brides in Hyderabad. The Andhra Pradesh Assembly has passed a new law that makes registration of marriages mandatory in the state. Failure could mean imprisonment.

The Muslim community is visibly upset, saying its marriages are governed by the Qazi Act of 1887 promulgated by the then Nizam of Hyderabad. Under the Act a local qazi documents the marriage and sends copies to five offices, including the apex Wakf Board, where the marriage is registered. The new law, the All India Muslim Personal Law Board feels, amounts to interference in Muslim personal laws. The Government sees it as empowering women.

Amarnath K. Menon

FDI Print Line

The Indian Newspaper Society (INS), apex grouping of Indian publishers, officially believes foreign investment should be kept out of the print media. An exchange4media.com poll suggests otherwise. Asking media professionals to vote on the issue, the poll found 81 per cent of its 1,035 respondents want FDI in print.

Presumably the other 19 per cent don't use Colgate toothpaste, wear Levi's jeans or travel on anything other than a 100 per cent swadeshi cycle rickshaw. To do otherwise would be to encourage the dreaded foreign hand.

SPOTLIGHT
Sniff of Trouble in Deer Land

The 6,000-odd surviving musk deer in the country are in for trouble-if Union Health Minister C.P. Thakur has his way. Musk, a gland in the abdominal region of the male deer, is a vital ingredient in several traditional systems of medicine as it is said to cure cold, impotency, paralysis and cardiac diseases, among other ailments.

Thakur proposes to commercialise the farming of musk deer and has earmarked Jammu, Himachal Pradesh and certain areas of Uttaranchal to farm his herd. The Environment Ministry and wildlife activists are up in arms against this proposal, saying it provides a legitimate cover for poachers to trade in the costly musk.

A similar project 20 years ago met with failure. This time around, it has, well, created a stink.

-Prerna Singh Bindra