Image: Ayesha Mumtaz inspects food during a raid on a backyard sweets factory in Lahore, Pakistan
Today, I want to share a story from about ten years ago that still burns in my mind. It is about a lady who did something almost impossible in a country like Pakistan. She did not just challenge the local culture, she stood up and slapped the face of an entire corrupt system. This is a personal story for me, and it is full of grit, so grab a tea or coffee and sit with me for a moment.
I have to start with identity. Ayesha Mumtaz belongs to the "Butt" caste. As many of you know, my full name is Muhammad Qasim Butt. In our culture, being a Butt means you love food; it is in our blood. But lately, I was talking to my father about our history. I asked him about the sacrifices our people made before the independence of Pakistan, but I told him I could not remember a modern character who truly challenged the system for a good cause. My father looked at me with a lot of passion and started naming people. When I asked if there was a woman who did this, the first name on his lips was Ayesha Mumtaz. I knew a little bit about her. People call her "The Fearless One," or as we say locally, "Dabang."
It is hard to know exactly where to begin. My father told me things from 2016 that never even made it to the news because we share the same caste, and stories travel through families. Whether those specific stories are 100% true or just legends, I do not know, but the facts recorded in newspapers and interviews are enough to prove she was a force of nature. In 2015, when she stepped out of her car, it felt like the whole jungle was on fire. When she became the Director of the Punjab Food Authority, food safety was a joke. She made the big brands remember their "naani" (grandmother). I will not name every brand, but they were all playing dirty. Their hands were black with greed.
She went to the famous M.M. Alam Road in Lahore, the place for "high-end" luxury dining, and showed the world the ugly truth behind the glitz. This was incredibly dangerous work. To give you an idea of how tense things are here, just yesterday on April 23, 2026, I saw a snatching where a middle-class electrician was killed by mobile snatchers only five minutes from my house. He gave them his phone and his money, but it was not enough for them, so they shot him. In an environment that violent and tense, "The Fearless One" kept exposing the food mafia one by one. Some people say the mafia won in the end, but I say she won. She gave Pakistan a ray of hope and forced the system to become stricter for years to come.
One of her quotes that always stays with me is: "Why, O’ Muslims, must you adulterate everything?" She did not just see it as a job, she saw it as a fight for our souls. She famously said she did not feel like she was in a Food Authority office, but rather in a National Geographic documentary. Why? Because she was uncovering beasts hidden in human clothing. These people were feeding us poison in the form of luxury meals, and they deserved to be called animals for what they were doing to their own people just to save a few pennies.
She was smart, too. She knew the system would try to hide her files or take bribes behind closed doors, so she used social media as her weapon. The Punjab Food Authority Facebook page blew up because she would upload everything, sometimes live. She did not care if you were a global giant like KFC or a local powerhouse. If you were feeding people filth, she would record it, upload it, and let the world see. Your "links" and "sifarish" meant nothing to her. Even today, you can see these videos being re-uploaded because even if they try to censor her, she has become a symbol that will not die.
It was not just the restaurants. She went head-to-head with the Milk Mafia, which is a level of danger most people in the world cannot imagine. In August 2016, she sealed factories that were packing expired powdered milk for families to use. This was the final straw for the people in power. The mafia and the politicians could not let their profits slip away so easily. The system eventually forced her onto a "paid leave." We all knew what that meant: it was the system's way of protecting its own greed. But Ayesha Mumtaz’s life is proof that even in a place like Pakistan, we must stand up against corporate greed and refuse to be silent consumers of poison.
Read more about her fight here:
The Iron Lady's Crackdown on Lahore, herald.dawn.com