Be aware of rotten vegetables and unethical practices by vendors and restaurants.
1. The vegetables are processed nicely by employing few boys and converted as ready to cook cut vegetables. Not so bad anyways since if spoiled part still exist, we can at least make out.
2. Most of these are brought by restaurants (big names included) in bulk. Here trimming also include not so clean part. Anyway once things go into gravy, it won’t be visible much.
3. The trimmings get converted into gravy with added ingredients to mask the bad smell.
Coming to the best part, small scale kitchen and road side vendors careful enough not to do that as their kitchen is open for us to see and they will be out of business if we see spoiled vegetables getting trimmed. However, vendors such as vada pav or pav bhaji need not be so careful as we don’t get to see what goes into those stuffs.
Out of curiosity, I asked a sandwich vendor, what he does with all the trimmings which are not suitable to put inside bread. He was dumping trimmings into a basket. His answer was, by evening, it will all get converted to gravy, by doing so, hotels save a lot on onion and it tastes better after grinding. Unfortunately, the way these trimmings were stored was not any better than fillings inside garbage truck.
Many of us blindly believe that these businesses have ethics. Let us face the fact, their motive is to make money. They can cut any corners to achieve the margin. The only thing which is clean and hygienic is what is visible, everything else should be viewed with suspicion. I am not paranoid about hygiene nor hyper sensitive OCD but we should know what we pay for. Unfortunately, no control authority can help us with these or curb such practice. more