Dr. Sulekh Chand Jain
Should Jains use silver foil (varak) in Indian sweets and on other food items?
In India, during the last few decades, a new menace has begun. This is the use of a very thin, silver foil called varak that is applied to the outside surface of several edible items including Indian sweets, some fruits, betalnut (paan) and some Ayurvedic medicines (as an ingredient). Varak is also used in flavored syrups as in kesar (saffron) syrup. Silver foil adds only glitter (nothing more) to the edible items. The silver-topped sweet is even served as prashad (holy offerings) in many temples and on auspicious and religious occasions. Strangely enough the same silver varak is also used to decorate the Shwetambar Jain pratimas (idols) in the temples.
Varak is highly toxic and poisonous to the health, makes an edible product tasteless and more expensive (because of the added cost and the labor involved in applying the varak to the edible product) and does nothing to enhance the taste. What is even more shocking is that the varak is non-vegetarian and its production process involves killing of specially selected live five-sensed animals.
Varak is not only dirty, but it is also non-vegetarian. Even meat- eaters do not eat intestines, which are used in its production. The use of these foils turns even sweets into non-vegetarian food. A few years ago Indian Airlines learned about this, and have since stopped using varak on the sweets served in their planes and issued instructions to its suppliers to supply sweets without silver varak.
If you keenly observe this varak under a microscope, don’t be perturbed if you happen to see traces of animal skin, hair, blood, meat, the stools and saliva of cattle or oxen - varak is made by hammering thin sheets of silver in between layers of bulls’ intestines. In other words, after slaughtering a bull, quickly his intestines are removed, and sold to the manufacturers of silver foil/ varak. The skins made of old intestines are of no use. Even one-day-old intestines cannot be used, because within a few hours they stiffen.
The silver foil/varak manufacturer removes blood and stool (if not pre-removed) from the intestines, and cuts them into pieces. Then he puts one piece over another, making a booklet out of them. At his home, or in the factory, he puts one silver (or gold) sheet in between each page of these intestines. Then he hammers it hard until those metal sheets turn into thin wafers.
The intestines of bulls are so strong, that even repeated hammering do not destroy them, nor they let the foil sheets move around inside. Because of the hammering, some tissues of the intestine mix with the foils. Afterwards, the foil manufacturer sells the bundle of foil to the sweets manufacturers. Some small foil manufacturers sell the foils to temples.
Not only is varak non-vegetarian, it is also very bad for your body - whether you are vegetarian or not. The silver cannot be digested; therefore, there are no benefits from its consumption. A study done in November 2005 by the Industrial Toxicology Research Centre in Lucknow on varak says that the silver foil available in the market has toxic and carcinogenic metals in the thin silver foil, including nickel, lead, chromium, and cadmium; all of these damage the body. Also, over half of the analyzed silver foil had lower silver purity than the 99.9 per cent purity stipulated by the prevention of food adulteration act of India. When such foil enters into the body, it releases heavy metals that can lead to cancer. The report also details the unhygienic conditions in which workers put silver in small leather bags and beat it into foil in filthy shops.
My brothers and sisters, I cannot understand this fad about its use on edible products. Not only you are eating a non- vegetarian product, but also for no reason you are putting poison in your body and are paying for it.
The use of varak in Jain temple cannot be justified on any grounds. By its use we are wrapping the holy and sacred Jain pratimas (idols) with meat and blood and destroying the sanctity of the pratimas. I ask, why? When will we wake up?
Contrary to many claims in India, to the best of my knowledge, no, and I repeat - no silver varak is made by machines and without the use of leather skins in the process. All processes involve animal parts.
A Personal Account:
In India hardly any sweet is available anymore without silver varak. Many years ago, I took a vow not to eat, buy, accept, or offer to others anything containing silver varak. I know it is a little inconvenient to find shops that sell sweets without varak but I will not buy anything else.
I talk about this choice all the time in India amongst my relatives and some look at me and think I am crazy and ignore me no matter how much I say. Still, I have been successful in convincing a few who have stopped its use, but this number is very small. I find the use of varak-covered sweets very prevalent in Jain homes.
About ten years ago, I attended a Jain wedding of a close relative of mine in India. At the end of the ceremony, the father of the bride offered me a box of some sweets. The box was fully covered with packaging so I could not see what was inside. I asked the host if the box had any silver covered sweets (which I suspected). The host said yes. In spite of my telling him that I would not touch any varak covered sweets; he kept on insisting and forced the box in my lap. As soon as he was gone, I went inside the storage room where hundreds of such boxes were stored and deposited my box there. He saw me doing this and came to me to tell me that it was rude and insulting on my part that I did so. Very politely I explained to him that I am sorry, but that I had no use for it except to throw it into the garbage - which I didn’t want to do, but he would not understand.
Brothers and sisters, such is the state of affairs.
The following additional information about the varak industry comes from an extensive and well-researched article written by Mrs. Menaka Gandhi; now the cabinet minister in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet in India.
“In India, by law, every food item has to have a green dot on it, if it is vegetarian, and a maroon dot, if it is non-vegetarian. If a manufacturer is found to be cheating by mislabeling his product, the sentence is many years in jail. So, why have the mithai (sweets) people not been arrested so far? Milk has been treated as vegetarian to appease the powerful dairy lobby, but the silver foil on each mithai cannot by any stretch of imagination be considered vegetarian”.
Beauty without Cruelty, a Pune-based NGO that investigates product ingredients, has produced a remarkable booklet on the varak industry. Here is their report on how it is made.
“The varakh-makers select animals at the slaughterhouse. Each animal is felt for the softness of its skin before it is killed. This means that a substantial number of goat, sheep, and cattle are killed specifically for the industry. Their skins are soaked in filthy, infested vats for few days to dehair them. Then, workers peel away the epidermal layer, which they call jhilli, just under the top layer of the skin in a single piece. These layers are soaked for 30 minutes in another decoction to soften them and left to dry on wooden boards. Once these are dry, the workers cut out square pieces 19 cm by 15 cm. These pieces are made into pouches called auzaar and stacked into booklets. Each booklet has a cover of thick lamb suede called khol. Thin strips of silver called alagaa are placed inside the pouches. Workers now hit the booklet with wooden mallets for three hours to beat the silver inside into the ultra- thin varakh of a thickness less than one micron called “999.” This varakh is then sent to sweet shops.”
Here are the statistics that you should know. An (one) animal’s skin can only make twenty to twenty-five pieces or pouches. Each booklet has 360 pouches. One booklet is used to make 30,000 varak pieces - much less than the daily supply of a single large mithai shop.
About 12,500 animals are killed for one kg of varakh. Every year, 30,000 kilograms of varakh (30 tons) are eaten on mithai. 25 million booklets are made by varak companies that keep their slaughterhouse connection secret. Now you can easily calculate hwo many animals are killed each year just for the varak. But the truth is that not only is this industry killing animals furiously, much of the animal tissue that the booklet is made of remains in the varak.
Many Jains know in their heart that varak is non-vegetarian. But they still use these dreadful items of mass destruction to decorate the idols of Jain tirthankars. How amazing that the idols of those that preached and practiced strict non-violence to all creatures should now be covered with slaughterhouse- derived silver foils. Jains (not all) do buy and use varask. Some try to bluff themselves by saying that the varak is machine- made, and no animal skin is used in its manufacture which most probably is not true. Is this practice any different than still prevalent practice of sacrifice (killing) of animals for worship and religious rituals in some Hindu temples which happens even today? Bhagwan Mahavir tirelessly worked to stop this animal sacrifice practice but his followers resorted to the same. What a mockery!
In their thorough investigation, Beauty Without Cruelty has done a thorough investigation and found that there is not a single machine-made piece of varak in India, or anywhere in the world.
On the internet, there are letters, including, for example, one from a person in Jalandhar claiming that he has a company which has “fully automatic machines manufactured with German collaboration to beat silver pieces in between a special Indian manufactured paper in a hygienic and controlled atmosphere run round the clock by qualified Engineers and experienced R&D team.” I looked into this, but when I followed this up, no factory of the given name, or even address, was found. To them I ask, do we make sure while buying that the varaks are machine made without the use of animal skin?
The production of varak is done mainly in India, in Patna, Bhagalpur, Muzaffarpur, and Gaya (which is a Buddhist holy center), in Bihar, Kanpur, Meerut, and Varanasi (the holy city of Hindus) in Uttar Pradesh, and in Jaipur, Indore, Ahmedabad, and Mumbai. The leather booklets come to the production sites from the slaughterhouses of Delhi, Lucknow, Agra, and Ratlam.
It is time we refused varak-covered mithai, fruit or paan. Mithai shops should be taken to court for not labeling their products non-vegetarian before selling them. I request everyone reading this article to strictly avoid the sweets that have silver varak on them. They are purely non-vegetarian.
Other researchers, including the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) also confirms this, as do Beauty Without Cruelty” and Mrs. Maneka Gandhi’s television program, “Heads and Tails.”
In India, one estimate indicates that 275,000 kilos of varak is consumed annually. Thus, an average middle class Indian family of four consuming approximately100 kg of sweets per year for forty years will have consumed silver foil produced with the gut of three cows and one-tenth of a cowhide! In India 275 tons of silver is transformed into varak that utilizes the intestines of 516,000 cows and the calf leather of 17,200 animals each year.
Can you imagine how many cattle and oxen are sacrificed for just a bit of taste? If you are surprised as I am, after reading this text please inform as many as possible so as to ensure that we don’t unknowingly consume beef.
Now you decide: is this behavior consistent with ahimsa?
