Lahore – Our Food Correspondent: Speaking to reporters from her office in Lahore, a visibly disturbed Ayesha Mumtaz, Director of the Punjab Food Authority (PFA), said that her research division had concluded that the city’s avid restaurant goers’ immunity-to-be-shocked had been raised to the extent that nothing short of actual pig-meat was going to shock them or deter them from going to these restaurants.
“Yeah, that includes donkey meat as well,” she said. “Doesn’t really shock them like it used to.”
Mumtaz – whose stint at the PFA was marked by a well-conducted publicity campaign to document the health and cleanliness violations by the restaurants of Lahore got a lot of publicity – says that now filthy utensils and grossly substandard cooking arrangements don’t get as many likes or shares as they used to in the past. “Time was when piles of filthy utensils waiting to be washed in a filthy bathroom, next to the commode, used to elicit a spirited, disgusted response,” she said, fighting back the tears. “But now, people move on to click on news items like election commission news or even cricket.”
“That is right,” says Haider Bhutta, Lahori restaurant patron. “I recently saw dirty conditions of the kitchen over at Chilleez in Gulberg on the PFA’s Facebook page. I might have been disgusted but it reminded me of their Golden Chilli Double Decker Fat-as-Fu*k Burger, which I hadn’t had in a while.”
“So here, I am, as soon as Chilleez reopened after five days,” he said, speaking to Khabristan Today’s reporter, while taking a huge bite out of his Golden Chilli Double Decker Fat-as-Fu*k Burger. “Does it smell of faecal matter? I don’t think so, but I might be wrong. I mean, I have actual photographic evidence by an independent government body to suggest otherwise, but this thing is tasty as fu*k!”
“This rising of the immunity level, is good for us,” says Saleha Bhatti, a restaurateur, at her eatery in Lahore. “Now we only need to meet the bare minimum no-pig-meat requirements.”
“But even that is also tough for us to do,” she said, returning her soup, which had a floating human head in it.