Perks and perils of being a VIP’s food-taster
Anyone else would call it a working holiday, but staff at Maharashtra Food and Drug Administration is hard to please.
As TOI reported on Friday, officials tasked with tasting food at VIP events are cribbing they feel like guinea pigs. Whoever heard of guinea pigs sampling 10 dishes at a time, thrice a day, for up to 13 days together?
And they get to open and taste the giveaway goodies too – desi laddus to imported chocolates. Since when has govt staff become so waistline conscious?
Turns out, it’s not their waist but their life these officials are worried about. They’re not roped in to play Gordon Ramsay, but Halotus, the man whose job was to keep poison out of Roman emperor Claudius’s food, by tasting it first.
It’s a different matter that he didn’t. Point is, there’s no joy in sampling rasmalai when you know it might have been poisoned.
No matter how long you do this job, you will never be reconciled to it. Margot Woelk was one of Hitler’s 15 women food tasters, and the only one who lived to tell her tale. Although she worked as taster for over two years, and the food was great, she said they cried after every meal “because we were so glad to have survived”.
Time was when food-tasting had its perks. For example, Sultan Iltutmish made Malik Tajuddin, his chashnigir or taster, commander of the stable.
But the perils were grave too. When Ibrahim Lodi’s mother tried to poison Babur via his chashnigir, Babur saw to it that four of the conspirators were cut up, flayed, shot, and trampled, respectively.
He liked variety. John Nicholson didn’t. In 1857, he hanged without trial his Indian cooks who had poisoned the officers’ soup. Now there are no perks, only perils. The West has given up VIP food-tasting, we should too.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
