As children, we dreaded the regular cathartic “clean-outs” our determined parents deemed necessary for holistic health and harmony. Pale green, thin lanceolate leaves and shelled, translucent brown pods of the senna tree would be purchased cheaply from the nearest neighbourhood pharmacy and soaked overnight in water, at the weekend, in preparation for the purge.
Early next morning, before breakfast and despite our noisy protests, we would be carefully administered small amounts of the potent, smelly brown liquid with a generous touch of pore-raising Epsom salts if we appeared to be even slightly off-colour, particularly bilious or generously decorated with too many blackheads.
Bitters were reserved for extreme cases when we had seemingly indulged heavily in serious syrupy excess, and gorged on far more oily and sweet school snacks than were suspiciously judged neither safe nor sound for lucid thought, long life and languorous limbs. Steeped in the small cup smoothly sculpted from the trunk of the tropical bitterwood/quassia amara tree, or drawn from pale splinters of this red-flowered beauty characteristically called amargo in most of South America for its namesake acrid taste, the tea was termed tonic, laxative, fever reducer, antimalarial, and anthelmintic or an intestinal worm killer, all in one.
Any sign of an abscess or “hard boil” and we would have to hurriedly swallow clear castor oil and take our traditional medicine of fetid boiled “caraille” or bitter gourd bush to stabilise blood sugar levels. Yet, we were rarely ever sick enough to revert to tablets other than cascara sagrada or see a medical doctor until late adulthood.
But we were confined to earthly purgatory alright and outside lavatory often at uneasy night, by the most unholy trinity of treatments. Senna from the Arabic “sana” for brilliance/radiance contains chemical sennosides that irritate the lining of the bowel causing a laxative effect. A distinctive mineral created from magnesium and sulphate, the crystal “salts” derive its epithet from Epsom, the small settlement in Surrey where it was discovered in a saline spring. (Coincidentally this week’s Sunday Stabroek featured the Guyanese hamlet in Berbice.)
A villager reputedly found a trickle within a hoof print left by his thirsty cow grazing in the common, one dry summer around 1618, so he dug a hole and by the next day, it had filled up with clear water but his animals refused to drink. He bravely had a taste and enthusiastically set about promoting it as a medicine.
Following the find, the rural community expanded and developed into a popular spa town by the early 17th century offering the powerful purgative product that was guzzled from sturdy stoneware jugs and distributed in huge jars across the country. Establishing the name in 1695, distinguished physician and botanist, Dr Nehemiah Grew first obtained the compound by boiling down the mineral waters and was granted an exclusive Royal patent for “The Way of Makeing the Salt of the Purging Waters perfectly fine…very cheape”.
Museum Curator Jeremy Harte recounted how a Dutch visitor would write in wonder, “It is drunk on an empty stomach from stoneware mugs holding about one pint. Some drink 10, 12, even 15 or 16 pints in one journey, but everyone as much as he can take. And one must then go for a walk, works extraordinarily excellent, with various funny results. Gentlemen and ladies have their separate meeting places, putting down sentinels in the shrub in every direction.”
I thought about the old Guyanese fondness for salts, shrubs and “bush,” given our long-time fatalistic saying, with the accompanying cynical shrug, of “wha nah kill nor cure yuh, will fatten yuh” especially in light of the sentinel role of the hard-pressed Government Analyst Food and Drug Department (GAFDD) and its small but brave team of inspectors. The Department is indeed proving “extraordinarily excellent” for having to deal with “various funny results” from the trickle turned flood of “cheape” food imports being dumped in every direction in the country. Unscrupulous dealers insist all is “perfectly fine” despite the load of crap being continually sold to consumers so blindly fixated on the questionable foreign stuff, to even notice the astonishing array of fresh, nutritious and safe produce available locally. The big question is how come Guyana has moved from being the Caribbean’s promised breadbasket to its biggest basket case?
While farmers’ markets and organic foods are big business elsewhere, some importers apparently still have excess hard currency to spend, itself a paradox in a time of reported shortages, on all manner of iffy and non-essential processed commodities that are compromised, expired or counterfeit. There is little or no conscience, and nary a thought for the long-term health and safety of customers who are nuts about canned cuisine and chicken about local fare. Considering the serious implications of a nation grown fat on the favoured free market system and now unwilling, unhappy and unfathomably unable to feed itself, these traders are clearly content selling Chinese cans of fishy fish, while rushing to the Courts to save their expired tins of condensed “milk” and flavoured “dairy” mixes adulterated with palm oil.
Recently, the Analyst Department moved to have a United-States based company, Central International Company LLC (CIC) of Massachusetts, finally suspended from providing supplies to Guyanese buyers, by seeking the necessary support of the Customs Excise and Trade Administration.
In a growing list of foreign “franken food” horrors featuring plastic and cadmium rice, toxic bean sprouts, mud-flaked “black pepper,” sewer oil, melamine milk, glow-in-the-dark and cienbuterol steroid pork, gel injected seafood, and now Brazilian rotten beef, the latest instalment involves the refusal of a shipment of 2,000 cartons of tuna labelled `Buiwick’ from the People’s Republic of China. Flagrantly designed to look like the “Brunswick” green and gold brand, there was no exact address of the manufacturer in the country of origin contravening regulations, apart from being “false, misleading and deceptive.”
The Department warned that CIC “knowingly and deliberately facilitates the importation of products into Guyana that are sub-standard and/or with inadequate labels” adding that the firm had, “on many occasions exported items of food to Guyana in the absence of documentation (Free Sale Certificate) in the prescribed form from the country of origin.”
While I am reeling over why anyone would prefer canned fish to a crisp cut of freshly seasoned red or grey Atlantic snapper, in its 2015 guide, Greenpeace found that 80 per cent of the tuna sold in the US failed to meet basic sustainability standards, with the worst performers being the big three brands of Bumble Bee, Chicken of the Sea and StarKist, in an industry plagued too by human welfare and labour issues. Another study by the non-profit protection group, Oceana concluded that nearly 60 per cent of “tuna” sold at restaurants and grocery stores was another type of fish entirely. Instead, most foods described as ‘white tuna’ may actually be escolar, a type of fish that can cause serious digestive effects, “including oily anal leakage.”
Serious resource-related weaknesses in the monitoring and enforcement regimes at the Guyana Department meanwhile, have opened the doors to concerted abuse of laws governing the importation of foods, medicines and cosmetics into the country, which have not been updated in 40 years, Stabroek News reported.
The tireless GAFDD Director Marlan Cole told Stabroek Business, that ongoing claims of harassment by guilty importers were designed to restrain efforts being made “in difficult circumstances” to protect Guyanese consumers from dubious products, which, in several instances, can be dangerous to human health.
“What we are faced with in some instances is the systematic dumping of sub-standard products in our country because of the lack of tools to police and correct the situation. Importers continually claim ignorance of the law as justification for these acts,” he noted.
Advising consumers to pay close attention to packaging and condition, labels for dates, addresses, country of origin, and instructions for storage, Cole cautioned that the language must be in proper English. Just this January, the Department blocked a shipping container crammed with thousands of boxes of flavoured Awal Junior Milk purchased from the distant desert Kingdom of Bahrain and aimed at children.
Tests of the “milk” proved that it was “adulterated with vegetable oil” fillers and contained 1.5% milk fat and not the recommended 2.5% in accordance with the legal provisions.
In December, 1700 cases of “Dost” sardines shipped in from China were “canned” after the Department found that the labelling was obviously tampered with and the tins were already rusting. Through coded information on the containers, samples revealed that the sardines were manufactured on August 1, 2014, and not on June 1, 2016 as claimed. The Free Sale/Health Certificate from China’s supervising administration was inconsistent with those usually presented and the exact name and address of the manufacturer were not stated, which violates the Food and Drug Regulations, the Department disclosed.
Purportedly prepared for “Geetangelie’s NewYork/ Toronto” the marker mistakenly declares in a juicy innuendo, “Always your friend on your table” but the biggest Freudian giveaway was the bizarre ribbon logo “Giving you food for a happy!” with the pictured heart at the centre showing such a shocking spike – it could only mean a massive, fatal cardiac attack. With the incessant stench and scandal it seems high time for a nationwide strong “dost” of Epsom salts and customary laxatives in a complete countrywide clear-out, as we wait to collectively exhale without keeling over as the fans whir furiously.
ID jokes about where the Lone Ranger takes his trash, while she considers whether five cans of tainted alphabet soup could constitute a massive vowel movement.
