Food Adulteration
2 Minutes
Food adulteration for kids: learn how items like milk, ghee, and turmeric are adulterated and simple tests to detect them. An English science lesson.
- Why milk is adulterated with urea and washing powder
- Testing ghee for potato or starch using iodine solution
- Detecting harmful lead chromate in turmeric using water
What this lesson teaches
Food adulteration is the practice of mixing cheap, low-quality, or poisonous substances into food products to reduce costs and increase profits. Adding these foreign materials reduces the quality of the food and makes it dangerous to eat.
Why food is adulterated
Shopkeepers and sellers adulterate food items primarily to increase their own profits. Because pure ghee is very expensive, sellers mix in cheap ingredients like boiled potatoes or starch to sell more volume at lower cost. In milk, suppliers add urea and washing powder to artificially increase the thickness and density of the liquid. While these additions boost profits for sellers, they degrade the quality of the food and make it poisonous.
Common adulterants in daily food
- Milk is mixed with washing powder and urea to increase thickness, affecting about 60 percent of the milk produced in India.
- Ghee is adulterated by mashing boiled potatoes directly into it or by mixing in starch chemicals.
- Turmeric powder is mixed with a chemical called lead chromate to enhance its yellow color.
- Sellers add these cheaper substances to expensive goods so that their profits increase significantly.
Testing food with simple experiments
Simple experiments can quickly detect whether kitchen foods contain harmful adulterants. To test ghee, take a spoon of ghee and add a single drop of iodine solution to it. Pure ghee shows no change, but ghee mixed with potato or starch turns violet. To test turmeric powder, place it in water; pure turmeric settles to the bottom, whereas turmeric with lead chromate turns the water a strong yellow.
Health dangers of adulterated food
Consuming adulterated food causes severe health problems and can be fatal. Drinking milk adulterated with urea or washing powder turns the milk poisonous and causes intense stomach pain. Handling lead chromate in adulterated turmeric causes skin problems, and eating food cooked with it can lead to lung cancer. Every year, 3,51,000 people die from eating adulterated food, which makes public awareness essential to prevent this danger.