No research is needed to show how important fish and milk are in Bengali life. Lunch is incomplete without fish beside the rice, and the morning barely starts without milk in the tea. As children we heard from our mothers that fish makes you clever and milk makes bones strong, and generations have grown up on that belief. Now scientists are giving news that makes us a little cautious before eating. Whether fish makes us clever I do not know, but the question of whether microplastics are entering our bodies with fish cannot be avoided. We always knew fish had bones; now we learn that when the environment is in poor shape, tiny particles of plastic may be in fish too. The suspicion that water is added to milk is old; now microplastics have joined the list. A new chapter seems to have opened in the long history of adulteration.

We used to suspect the milkman. Now the question is whether we must suspect the cow as well. The poor cow is not at fault. It eats grass, drinks water and eats whatever looks like food around it. It does not know that people have thrown polythene bags, plastic bottles, crisp packets, food packaging, cups, plates and all the rubbish of civilisation everywhere. From cities to villages, cows can be seen searching for food in rubbish heaps by the road.

Plastic gets into the animal's body with that rubbish. Plastic in the environment breaks down into tiny particles that mix with soil and water, enter animals and can come back to people through the layers of the food chain. The cow gives milk, and we drink it. We threw plastic into nature, and nature sent it back to our breakfast. Nature seems to have launched a home delivery service; the only difference is that the delivery charge is paid later, at the hospital counter.

Bengalis love fish and milk, but above all the modern Bengali loves plastic. Plastic to the market, to the office, on outings, in restaurants, to the haor, to the sea, to the hills. Then most of that plastic is handed to nature instead of being thrown in the proper place. Going somewhere clean and leaving it a little dirty seems to be an unwritten rule of our tourism culture. As tourist numbers rise at Cox's Bazar, St Martin's Island, Kuakata, Sajek, Bandarban, the haors of Sunamganj and other popular spots, plastic waste rises too. We go to see nature's beauty and leave our packets as a signature on it.

Look at Bangladesh's rivers, canals, beels, haors and coastal wetlands to see how deep our relationship with plastic is. Plastic bottles, polythene, food packets, crisp wrappers and other waste line the banks of the Padma, Meghna, Jamuna, Karnaphuli, Buriganga, Shitalakshya, Turag, Surma, Kushiyara and countless small rivers and canals. From city drains to village canals, the final destination of our plastic seems to be water.

Household rubbish goes into the drain, from the drain to the canal, from the canal to the river, from the river to the estuary, and then into the world of fish. Fish live and feed in that water. After tiny particles of plastic enter aquatic animals, that same fish one day arrives at market in an ice box. We buy it, wash, cut and cook it, call the family to eat and say the fish is wonderfully fresh today. Fresh, certainly, but perhaps with a small souvenir of our civilisation too.

The Bengali love of fish needs no explanation. Rui, katla, hilsa, pangas, tilapia, pabda, shing, magur, koi, boal, prawns and countless other local fish are part of our food culture, supplied by our rivers, canals, beels, ponds, haors and coast. But the more we pollute that aquatic environment, the more fish habitat shrinks. Industrial waste, sewage, farm chemicals and plastic in river water are not only an environmental problem but a food-safety problem. We want fish but do not want to keep their habitat safe; we want fresh fish at market, but many of us object to not throwing plastic into the river the fish comes from. It is like wanting flowers from the garden but refusing to water the plant.

The story of milk is no less striking. Milk is food for children, a companion to tea, the main ingredient of sweets and an important part of the rural economy. But we need to be more aware of the environment where milk is produced, the cows' feed and water, and how milk is collected and transported. How plastic or microplastics enter cows and how much may reach milk is a matter for scientific research. But there is little doubt that if the environment where we keep animals and people fills with plastic, the food chain will be affected one way or another. So the answer to what is in milk cannot stop at calcium, protein, fat and vitamins; the environment where food is produced must also be kept safe. If we worried about the surroundings of dairy cows even half as much as we worry about milk quality, the food system might be much safer.

Polythene is banned in Bangladesh; there are efforts to control single-use plastic, environmental laws, drives and fines. It sounds good. The problem is that the declarations on paper do not match the real market. Ask a shopkeeper not to give you polythene and he will look at you as if you had asked him to close his shop and become an ascetic, then hand you a thin polythene bag big enough for everything from fish to vegetables. You may say polythene is banned; he will think, banned or not, you are not going to carry your shopping in your hands.

Our market culture shows deep loyalty to plastic: a packet for vegetables, another for fish, a thicker one for meat, a small one for chillies, another for coriander. Ice with the fish, polythene with the ice, and another polythene over that, as if we were carrying national security documents rather than fish. Online food orders are worse: a food packet, another inside it, a small one for sauce, a wrapper for the spoon, a water bottle and tissues, so that there is often more packaging than food. We fill our stomachs with food and the earth with plastic.

Plastic waste is also linked to urban waterlogging. When the rains come the roads flood; drain mouths are blocked, canals filled in and gutters full of rubbish. Then we vent our anger on social media, blaming the city corporation, the government or development plans. Certainly there are failures of urban management, unplanned development, encroachment on canals and inadequate waste management. But we are not keen to admit the role of the plastic we throw away ourselves. The bottle thrown on the road in the morning may be stuck in a drain mouth by afternoon; then, when it rains, we stand asking why the city is flooded, while the bottle perhaps smiles quietly from inside the drain.

We use plastic for a few minutes, but it stays in nature for a long time. Sun, heat, water, wind and time break it into ever smaller pieces until it cannot be seen with the naked eye, and once we cannot see it we relax. We make a fuss about problems we can see and do not consider invisible ones problems at all. We see smoke, so we talk about air pollution; we see black river water, so we talk about river pollution. But because microplastics cannot be seen, we discuss them for a few days and then go home with a plastic bottle in hand. Our fight against an invisible danger seems invisible too.

Here lies the biggest irony. We once came home from the market with plastic bags; now that plastic is returning to the food chain by various routes. Research has produced worrying findings about microplastics in various samples from the human body, and scientists are still studying the health effects. Yet we have entered a reality where tiny plastic particles can reach the human body while we remain unenthusiastic about using less plastic. There is no scientific rule that a small particle means a small danger. Our problem is no longer just mountains of plastic, but the chance that those mountains break down and invisibly enter our food, water and bodies.

It is time to see plastic not just as rubbish but as a problem of food safety and the future. A polythene bag is used for five minutes, but its story is long. A bottle thrown into the river today may be in a fish tomorrow and back on our plates the day after. Nature may then say: what you threw away, I have returned to you.

The writer is a senior columnist.

Source: Jagonews24. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.