SILVER FOIL - VARAKH is NON VEG

[Guest guest]

  Damodardesh (Yatra) wrote:

 

 

Sweets are non-vegetarian

 

 

Beasts in my belfry / Maneka Gandhi

 

In India, by law, every food item has to have a green doton it, if it is

vegetarian - and a maroon dot, if it is non-vegetarian. If a manufacturer

is

found to be cheating by mislabelling his product, the sentence is many years

in

jail.

 

So, how have the mithai (sweets) people not been arrested so far? Milk has

been

treated as vegetarian to appease the powerful dairy lobby, but the silver

foil

or 'varakh' on each mithai cannot by any stretch of

imagination be considered vegetarian.

 

'Beauty Without Cruelty', aPune-based NGO that investigates into

product

ingredients, has produced a remarkable & nbsp;booklet on the varakh

industry.

Here is their report on how it is made.

 

The varakh-makers select animals at the slaughterhouse. Each animal is felt

for

the softness of its skin before it is killed. This means that a substantial

number of goat, sheep and cattle are killed specifically for the industry.

Their skins are soaked in filthy, infested vats for 12 days to dehair them.

Then, workers peel away the epidermal layer, which they call jhilli, just

under

the top layer of the skin in a single piece. These layers are soaked for 30

minutes in another decoction to soften them and left to dry on wooden

boards.

 

Once these are dry, the workers cut out square pieces 19 cm by 15 cm. These

pieces are made into pouches called auzaar and stacked into booklets. Each

booklet has a cover of thick lamb suede called khol. Thin strips of silver

called alagaa are placed inside the pouches. Workers now hit the booklet

with

wooden mallets for three hours to beat & nbsp;the silver inside into the

ultra-thin varakh of a thickness less than one micron called '999'.

This

varakh is then sent to sweet shops.

 

Here are the statistics that you should know. An animal's skin can make

20-25

pieces/pouches only. Each booklet has 360 pouches. One booklet is used to

make

30,000 varakh pieces - less than the daily supply of a single big mithai

shop.

 

About 12,500 animals are killed for one kg of varakh. Every year, 30,000 kg

of

varakh (30 tonnes) & nbsp;are eaten on mithai. 2.5 crore booklets are made

by

varakh companies that keep their slaughterhouse connection secret. But the

truth is that not only is this industry killing animals furiously, much of

the

animal tissue that the booklet is made of remains in the varakh.

 

Each Jain knows in his heart that varakh is non-vegetarian. But they still

use

these dreadful items of mass destruction to decorate the idols of Jain

tirthankars. How amazing that the idols of those that preached and

& nbsp;practised strict non-violence to all creatures should now be covered

with

slaughterhouse derived silver foils. Jains are the biggest buyers of the

varakh industry. Many try to bluff themselves by saying that the varakh is

machine-made. 'Beauty Without Cruelty' has done a thorough

investigation

and

found that there is not a single machine-made varakh piece in this country

(or

even the world).

 

On the web, there is one letter from a person, Jalandhr a, claiming that he

has

a company which has " fully automatic machines manufactured with German

collaboration to beat silver pieces in between a special Indian

manufactured

paper in a hygienic and controlled atmosphere run round the clock by

qualified

Engineers and experienced R & D team " . Initially, we were importing the

special

paper from Germany. But when I followed this up, no factory of the given

name,

or even address, was not found.

 

The production of varakh is done mainly in north India: Patna, Bhagalpur,

Muzaffarpur and Gaya (which is a & n bsp;Buddhist holy centre) in Bihar;

Kanpur,

Meerut and Varanasi (the holy city of Hindus) in Uttar Pradesh; and Jaipur,

Indore, Ahmedabad and Mumbai. The booklets come to them from the

slaughterhouses of Delhi, Lucknow, Agra and Ratlam.

 

Not only is varakh non-vegetarian, it is also very bad for your body -

whether

you are vegetarian or not. The silver cannot be digested; therefore, there

are

no benefits from its consumption . A study done in November 2005 by the

Industrial Toxicology Research Centre in Lucknow on varakh says that the

silver

foil available in the market has toxic and carcinogenic metals in the thin

silver foil, nickel, lead, chromium and cadmium.

 

Over half of the analysed silver foils had lower silver purity than the 99.9

per cent purity stipulated by the prevention of food adulteration act of

India.

When such foil enters into the body, it releases heavy metals that can lead

to

cancer. The report also details the unhygienic conditions in which workers

put & nbsp;silver in small leather bags and beat it into foil in filthy

shops.

 

It is time we refused varakh-covered mithai, fruit or paan. If you want to

send

booklets to all your sweetshops, you can send a donation to Beauty Without

Cruelty, 4 Prince of Wales Drive, Wanowrie, Pune-411040 (Tel: 020-26871166).

 

As for me, I think that this year, I will take the mithai shops to court for

not labelling their products non-vegetarian, before selling them. Let us

see

how many of them & n bsp;go to jail, or have their business closed down. I

suggest you cut out this article and show it to your local sweetshops.

Regards

 

Nambiar Manoj Kumar

Manager - IT

Bhaktivedanta Hospital

Bhaktivedanta Swami Marg,

Sector 1, Srishti Complex,

Mira Road (E)

Office - 28459888 Ext- 2145

Direct - 28453852

Mobile No. 9323939323

______________________________ ____________________