How FSSAI cheated India's beekeepers, and you

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Editor's note: The news broke, as it does these days, with a tweet. Mukesh Pathak’s feed is a patchwork of WhatsApp forwards, selfies, factoids about honey and exaltations of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party. But on 1 November, the beekeeper from Rampur, Uttar Pradesh, digressed with this announcement: The snippet he linked to is one of those whose minutiae make sense only to specialists; in this case, food scientists and technologists. But you needn’t be a specialist to read between the lines or know about the butterfly effect, know that the push of an 'Enter' key here and a pen stroke there can have repercussions. Mukesh Pathak knew. That four amendments made on 29 October by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India or FSSAI—the statutory body tasked with food safety for 1.3 billion people—were a brazen legitimization of honey adulteration. *** If the honey bee had fingers, it’d have the world wrapped around its pinkie. It’d also flip the bird to humans. Because despite 75% of our food produce depending on pollinators and honey prices being …