In India, a country where cows are sacred, the dairy market is awash with adulterated products. The most recent scandal occurred on February 8. In Gujarat, one of the country’s leading dairy producing states, the local police crime-fighting task force in Sabarkantha discovered that a factory had been manufacturing synthetic milk and buttermilk for nearly five years using chemicals. Employees at Shree Satya Dairy Products had been mixing a host of dangerous substances into their products, including laundry detergent, urea-based fertilizer, caustic soda, refined palm oil, soybean oil, whey powder and skimmed milk powder. For years, hundreds of people in the Sabarkantha and Mehsana districts had consumed this concoction.

The move was purely profit-driven: With just 300 liters of real milk, the facility produced nearly 1,800 liters of artificial milk each day. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) reported that the hazardous milk stocks had been destroyed on site. The factory was shut down, as was another facility that had been producing milk from urea and palm oil.

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