Report on Food Adulteration

Open with the scale of the problem or a recent drive against it, then give the kinds of food involved and the chemicals used, the health consequences, what the mobile courts have done, and what the law provides. Reports on adulteration are strongest when they name specific foods rather than talking about adulteration in general.

The question: Write a report on food adulteration in Bangladesh.

The format

Find the event

Adulteration is a condition, not news. The report needs a drive, a seizure, a court or a study to hang on, and it goes in the first sentence.

• A mobile court drive is the standard device.
• Give the area and the number of traders fined.
• 🚨 Do not open with a general statement that adulteration is widespread.

Name the foods and the substances

The second paragraph is where the report becomes specific: which shops, which products, which colours or preservatives, what was destroyed.

• Three kinds of premises is enough.
• Name the food safety authority as the inspecting body.

Let an inspector say what does not work

A quoted inspector admitting that fines are too small turns an official account into journalism. Close with the health background, attributed to physicians.

• One quotation, two sentences.
• ⚠️ Keep health effects to two sentences and attribute them.

Model answer

Model answer (about 205 words)

Mobile court fines eight in city food drive

Staff Correspondent

Dhaka, 5 September: A mobile court fined eight traders a total of several lakh taka on Thursday during a day-long drive against food adulteration in Jatrabari and Shyampur, officials said.

The drive, conducted with a magistrate and inspectors from the Bangladesh Food Safety Authority, covered a wholesale fruit market, three sweetmeat shops and two bakeries. Inspectors said they found artificial colour in sweets, unlabelled chemical preservatives in bakery products, and fruit ripened with prohibited agents. A quantity of adulterated goods was destroyed on the spot.

"The same shops were warned in the last drive," a food safety inspector told this correspondent. "The fines are not large enough to change behaviour, and that is the difficulty."

Physicians say prolonged consumption of adulterated food contributes to kidney and liver disease, and paediatricians have linked artificial colouring to problems in children. Consumer rights groups have long argued that enforcement is too occasional to deter traders, and have called for regular inspection rather than seasonal drives.

What earns and loses marks

• Name the specific foods and the specific adulterants. “Artificial colour in sweets” and “fruit ripened with prohibited agents” report something; “adulterated food is everywhere” does not.
• Put the numbers in the first sentence. A news report leads with how many, where and when; anything else in the opening line is an essay opening in disguise.
• 🚨 Keep yourself out of it. “We should all be careful on the roads” is a sentence from a composition and loses the register mark immediately.
• Attribute every claim you could not have witnessed. Unattributed figures are the clearest sign of an invented report.
• About 180 to 220 words in four short paragraphs is the right length; newspaper paragraphs are short by convention.