POLOKWANE – Some schools in the city are advising children and parents not to support independent ice-cream vendors who wait at the schools before and after school as well as at break times.
This comes after some children complained of stomach cramps after eating ice-cream and sweets bought from such vendors at their schools. Schools complained that with the vendors being independent, and not working for a recognised company, this meant that the products they sold were not necessarily checked for freshness or approved for sale.
According to one parent, Jacky Bopape, her daughter and son felt ill after consuming the ice creams and sweets they had bought from an independent merchant in Flora Park just after school. “The children were on their way home from school when they bought the ice-cream and I was only told about it after they started feeling ill later in the evening. I had to rush them to the doctor. It was only when we questioned what the children may have eaten, in order to establish what had made them sick, that we found out about the ice-cream and sweets they had bought,” Bopape said.
She said the children had been so ill that they had to miss a day of school while recovering.
A local ice-cream sales representative, Janine Roux, who works for a well-known ice-cream brand, said there were several health dangers that uncontrolled ice cream could pose, and this made buying from street merchants a dangerous game. She said bacterial contamination was the main danger as the ice-cream could get old before being sold by these independent merchants.
“Foods like ice-cream spoiled by bacteria may look, smell and taste just fine but can make a person ill,” Roux said. She added that bacteria thrived in protein-rich foods that were also full of water, including eggs, poultry, meat, fish and milk products.
She emphasised that in her job, one of the most important tasks she had was to make sure that ice-cream did not melt and that the freezers they used to keep the ice-cream in remained on the same temperature constantly.
She said this was important as freezing ice-cream and other frozen dairy products slowed bacterial growth but did not kill the bacteria, which began to grow again as the product became defrosted. She said this often made street merchants’ products very dangerous as many of the products were being allowed to defrost and were then refrozen. “This helps the growing of bacteria and makes the foods almost poisonous,” Roux said.
Bopape said she had contacted the school her children attended and the school had agreed to rather have one of the teachers sell cooldrinks and other treats at the school to prevent the children from buying anything that could make them ill.
Polokwane police spokesperson, Capt Ntobeng Phala, said the police could deal with cases in which children had fallen ill because of something they had bought and eaten.
He said if it was believed that the children were ill because of food bought from a specific merchant, this could be investigated by the police.
“We have been saying this for some time now and I will say it again. When people buy from people on the street there is no guarantee that the food is safe as it has not been tested.
In South Africa there is a standard that all food must be tested by and if people buy from recognised shops they are guaranteed to be safe from things like food poisoning but this is not the case when buying from a person on the street,” Phala said.
He added that in most cases the people selling on the street were not registered and could be trading illegal. “By supporting them residents are also supporting illegal activities,” he said.
