MUMBAI: In an adulteration-battling, early-1970s Mumbai, when the silver foil covering local gulab jamuns was made up of 98% aluminium, an exhibition in Girgaum—brimming with spurious food colouring agents, sawdust-filled powders and false weights— debunked various kitchen myths for the “housewife”.
Among those who demonstrated on-the-spot food quality tests at this Consumer Guidance Society of India show was an unassuming scientist who had herself been subjected to a year-long quality test before she could enter a man’s world. Kamala Sohonie, then director of Bombay's Institute of Science, had become the country’s first woman PhD in biochemistry in the 1930s.
