India: The New Junk Food Frontier
By 2050 India’s biggest food war may not be how to feed 400 million more people but how to save them from becoming addicted to junk food.
In Govandi slum, one of Mumbai’s largest, Shakeela wakes up at 3 a.m. to fill buckets of water. Water will be available at 4 a.m. and the line is already half-a-mile long. A widow, with seven children, she can only carry two buckets. Her eldest Fauziya, thirteen, could have helped, but must remain at home to watch over the others. On her way back, Shakeela stops at a local shop. These are two a penny in Govandi, row upon row of huts with windows showcasing tobacco, beedis, gutka and something else that’s become equally ominous: neon-coloured, child-friendly, imported and local crisps, snacks and aerated drinks. Shakeela will purchase some of these. They are light to carry, stay fresh for days and they buy her some peace when her young children cry. It also means she doesn’t have to use water to boil eggs for breakfast or wash dishes.
Fauziya will place a packet in each of her sibling’s hands and they will munch them all the way to school. Except her younger brother Raiz who is so malnourished he can’t walk to school anymore. But despite his ill health he will continuously demand to eat packaged noodles. Two of Shakeela’s boys are grossly overweight, but their vitamin profiles are morbidly poor.
It is estimated that more than 50 per cent of the children in Dharavi, another Mumbai slum, are moderately or severely malnourished. While malnutrition has always been associated with starvation, India is now developing the new trend, a malnutrition associated not with being poor, but with poor eating habits, similar to America’s growing obesity from unsuitable diets.
According to the American Diabetes Association in 2012, 29.1 million Americans are afflicted by diabetes, often caused by unsuitable diets, with another 86 million diagnosed with pre-diabetes. Now compare this to Indian statistics: diabetes has increased from 1.2 per cent in 1971 to 12.1 per cent in 2013. The International Diabetes Federation estimates that India has 65 million diabetic adults which is projected to increase to 109 million by 2035. The problem is particularly acute in urban slums. But what’s worse is Indian children develop it ten years earlier than their Western counterparts do. In 2012, it was estimated to have killed about one million Indians.
And all of it is linked directly to the consumption of foods that are high in fat and sugar. It is a well-known fact that Indians favour expensive, calorific food as a way of showing hospitality. Lavishing sweets on guests and relatives is a matter of pride for us, a sign of prosperity. Crisil rates that India’s current fast food market is set to double to Rs 70 billion by 2016. In fact it is estimated that by 2015, India, Russia and Brazil will spend a larger percentage of their GDP on food than Japan, making India a major retail grocery market worldwide.
So the biggest fast-food companies have swooped down on India to feed the emerging needs of a burgeoning middle class with products that are under increased scrutiny by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in America. PepsiCo, Coca Cola, Dominos, Taco Bell, Kraft are now in India with myriad strategies to woo customers: low cost, speedy delivery and modified recipes that cater specially to India’s palate—a spicy burger at McDonald’s or masala-laced chips from Lays. Pizzas and burgers account for 80 per cent of the quick service food in India. Spending in Tier 2 and 3 cities is expected to increase by 150 per cent by 2016, faster than in big metros.
And in keeping with their historical, global marketing policies, children were fair game. It was only in 2010 that eleven companies in India, including PepsiCo and Kellogg’s, agreed to consider not advertising to children under the age of twelve in India and avoid targeting primary schools unless their product met nutritional requirements.
But what is ‘junk’ food? Is it calorific food? If so, think again about your Naniji’s oily theplas. Is it GMO or genetically modified food? In which case PepsiCo India’s Uncle Chips is on Greenpeace’s ‘green list’ while Nestle’s Lactogen is not. Or is it food with enhancers and additives for that Umami taste you love so much? Is it hormones in your milk or pesticide-treated wheat? The bad news is there is no escape. The definition of junk food is expanding and it’s either one of these or a combination of all.
While it is easy to blame multinationals for India’s growing junk food addiction, a closer look at our desi diet also raises doubts. For instance, is a typical Indian breakfast healthier than a bowl of Honey Loops or a breakfast burrito? Aloo paranthas, poha, congee, medu vada, idlis—all carbohydrate and fat-rich, meant to kick-start the day, are not low-calorie meals. How many vitamins does a butter dosa have, how much fibre is there in a plate of Sheera? So can you blame golden cereal with skim milk for your diabetes? While homemade food may not contain as many preservatives, may have been cooked with cleaner oil and fresher produce, a Mysore bonda is still a fatty, salty snack. While 100 g of Cream and Onion Lays has approximately 544 calories, a similar-sized plate of deep-fried samosas13 has about 508.
The average meal served at American chains like Wendy’s or IHOP have ranged from 1200-1800 calories without dessert and sides. But how is this any different from our thalis which consist of repeated servings of rice and ghee-smeared rotis? As it turns out, not very different at all. The average Indian thali with dessert but, only one helping, ranges from 1600-2000 calories. A Haldiram’s 10 g bag of aloo bhujia is 63 calories. This means it’s more calorific than 10 g of Cheeto’s Cheez Puffs at 51.3 calories. A vada pao is a cheap meal for someone on a budget, at Rs 15-20 for a roughly 300-calorie potato-fritter bun. But how many Indians will blame this snack for heart disease or sue any pao bhaji vendor outside Bandra Kurla Complex? And how different is a portion of Doritos from freshly-fried kachoris or Kailash Parbat’s aloo chaat?
There are differences. Some real, some psychological, and many to do with product reach. Cheeto’s Cheese Balls are described on the PepsiCo India website as ‘Goodness of Wholegrain’ and ‘Made with Real Cheese’. When was the last time a Punjabi cheese parantha was described this way?
Packaged food provides a similar kind of comfort that your local halwai or artery-clogging mughlai tadka dal does, except it’s cheaper, stays for days, you can buy it from any grocer, supermarket, movie theatre, mall, airport and you can take it with you anywhere. But are you less likely to contract dysentery from street side pani puri or from a carton of juice?
Large food companies market aggressively and as more young adults in India will have access to cell phones, it will be harder to resist advertising. These products are also a homogenizing factor in a country with class and caste differences. While brandishing an iPad in school may not be possible yet for a slum-dweller’s child, there is pride in eating the same chocolate bar as the employer’s son.
While portion sizes for food in India are smaller and the super-size concept is yet to take hold,14 we have, like other countries in Asia and Africa, moved away from long-established diets to Western eating. There has been a drop in consumption of the common man’s food: cassava, plantains, yams and millets in India’s urban diets, and an increase in maida, polished rice and animal products.
15Fast food is optimized and engineered like pharmaceuticals and perfumes. Mouth-feel, crunch factor, suggestive colours, high salt and sugar content, MSG often described as flavour enhancer E621, these foods are meant to sell in volume and the only way to do that is to make them addictive. The creation of Prego Spaghetti sauce, Dr Pepper soda or Campbell’s soups take millions of dollars of marketing. But are they more or less addictive than your favourite jalebi?
India is yet to be introduced in a big way to one of the commercial-food industries’ most beloved and controversial ingredients: high fructose corn sugar (HFCS). From allegations of being a major cause of obesity and fatty liver in America, it has even been suggested that HFCS is a brain inhibitor. It doesn’t let the brain tell your body that you’ve had enough and well, you keep eating.
So while we argue the demerits of HFCS, the question is: how can we not create a generation of sofa aloos (couch potatoes)? Do we need to go back to eating like our Stone-Age ancestors? Will that turn diabetics into Dronacharyas? Does India need a Juhu Beach version of the South Beach Diet to survive the onslaught of carbonated drinks and space age ‘just-add-hot-water’16 Taco Bell condensed-bean flakes? Should we give up vegetarianism, sharpen our spears and head to the few remaining acres of forest land we have in search of deer? Fortunately, no.
The belief that hunter-gatherer tribes ate mostly meat is untrue. While game was the most coveted meal, it had to be pursued and luck often did not favour the hunter.17 Reports by National Geographic have argued that plant diet comprised 70 per cent of the intake of some prehistoric tribes and it came from foraging for roots and fruits. Demonstrably chasing pig-like tapirs (meat prized by the Tsimanes of Bolivia) required more energy than writing computer code. It’s fair to hope that Alaskan seal, unlike factory meat, is not pumped with hormones, which remain even after cooking.
While 30 per cent of Indians are vegetarian by choice, many are vegetarians out of necessity. As environmentalists preach the urgent need to decrease meat consumption, India will not listen. Many Indians, given the opportunity, will eat meat and if provided with the right price point, will buy gigantic burgers and insulin defying Twinkies.
Take a look at the KFC menu and it’s a finger-licking wasteland of chicken, salt and oil. Six pieces of KFC chicken cost Rs 399, with a 20 per cent discount for orders over Rs 1000, which is instantly available, while entire chicken can be purchased for Rs 180-250 at the local butcher, but has to be washed, refrigerated or cooked immediately. India has become the world’s largest consumer of farmed poultry raised on a questionable diet, crammed into cages, strung up by their legs and slaughtered in unhygienic environments. But then goat meat is far more expensive.
How good can food like this be for us? While the Western world is reeling from its mechanized farming debacles, India seems determined to move in this direction by marginalizing small farmers, ignoring seasonal diets, adopting GMO foods, pumping money into milking machines and causing untold misery to animals.
Human diets evolve over time, but so do human bodies in their capacity to break down what they eat. Less Indians are lactose intolerant than their Chinese neighbours, whose traditional diet post breast-feeding doesn’t contain much lactose while paneer and lassi are must-haves for us.18 Studies suggest that the Mayans never had diabetes until the 1950s when they turned to North American diets. After the fall of the Soviet Union the Yakut tribals who discovered market foods, developed weight problems.
Indians still consume more fresh vegetables and whole grains than their Western counterparts. This may be in part due to ancient eating habits, with a majority of our population living off the land, but also because we eat more home-cooked meals and the traditions of our elders still hold sway. I recall the discussions during my 2013 book tours with women both in India and the United States about the difficulties of keeping the home-cooked meal alive. India’s disposable household income has trebled since 2004, and while statistics on the labour force are debatable, we do see more women at work in both formal and informal sectors. While there are more double income rural than urban families, the numbers will increase as India realizes enticing women into businesses will significantly boost growth rates.
So as more women go out to work, they will have less time to roll chapattis–some will even resent it. I recall my mother waking up early to cook breakfast before heading out to work, then returning home to make dinner. Priorities and needs have changed since then, albeit slowly. One newly-married Hyderabad techie told me her husband refuses to share the cooking. So she now purchases chapattis even though it costs four times as much as making them at home, but it buys her more time with her kids and two hours at the salon to keep her groomed for work. A fifty-year-old Chandigarh accountant and mother of three said she now cooks only thrice a week and orders takeout instead so she has more time to generate work online. In contrast, a Boston woman complained that taking ‘home science’ courses off the American curricula was a mistake, as young American women no longer know how to ‘sew, cook or how to run a home’.
While these expectations may be sexist, there is little argument against sharing a freshly prepared meal with the family. But who is going to cook it?
British chef Jamie Oliver’s mission to reduce children’s exposure to processed foods led him to a high school in the United States, where an ice cream sundae contained the deliciousness of beaver anal glands and female lac bugs. Similarly, the Indian Mid-Day Meal Scheme for children at government schools, though far from being perfect, is at least a free meal of boiled rice and lentils, vastly different from my husband’s Minnesotan school canteen lunches in the late eighties. His gourmet choices ranged from reheated pizzas, French fries, Otis Spunkmeyer cookies, nachos with synthetic cheese and vending machine vomited candy bars.
The cooking oil used at home contains some trans, saturated and poly unsaturated fats and while we will never know the exact pesticides used on our favourite mangoes, a decreased diet of prepared foods will reduce the intake of additives used to make commercial food tastier and longer-lasting.19 At some point or another, food giants have introduced in their products, among dozens of other chemicals, glycerin; a shaving cream solvent, propylene glycol, found in antifreeze and sexual lubricants; dimethylpolysiloxane, a silicone used in plastic toys; calcium silicate, a sealant for roofs; and silicon dioxide found in quartz used as an anti-caking agent.
When the Maggi noodles lead scandal broke out in India, I wondered if Indians thought as much about the quantities of lead in our drinking water, wall paint, cigarettes and the effect of blitzing food in microwaves and the toxins in everyday plastic. Let’s be fair, how can anyone expect a machine-made product in vacuum-sealed plastic which doesn’t expire for months to be infallible? With fast-food the profits these companies make are for the convenience, novelty, ease, taste, prices, portion sizes and status they provide the public. Now we also want them to make it 100 per cent healthy. Open your fridge and kitchen cupboards and count the convenience products you have. Now imagine preparing these foods from scratch.
So what can India do to combat its potential junk food crisis without confining women to the kitchen, stifling food retail, chasing away foreign investment and potentially allowing Uncle Ram into the domain of personal menu planning? Will we someday have gastric bypass camps forced on us by zealous governments, or crunchy munchies seized from our pudgy paws by diet police?
To begin with, the debate for all commercial food should be unhealthy vs toxic, some days vs everyday, otherwise you will have to ban everything, even commodities, which can be GMO foods. While upper class Indian households can still employ cooks, the domestic help crisis will worsen as the workforce prefer to work in offices where they feel more respected.
Everyone cannot afford a farm where they grow their own ‘pure’ produce either. Joint families are losing favour and there are fewer people nurturing families. Homes for the elderly are scarce and geriatric care is still the responsibility of the bahu (daughter-in-law).
The bitter truth is that the desi wife is no longer willing to be sacrificed at the altar of curd rice. Gender roles will have to be modified. While going organic isn’t a financially viable option in India yet, returning to some ancient foods like jowar, bajra, ragi, eating what is naturally in season, delving into India’s treasure trove of Ayurvedic foods and relegating restaurant takeout to what they were twenty years ago, treats for special occasions and not everyday consumption, may be our only way out of this mess. We have long levied taxes on alcohol and tobacco. Will we consider a policy similar to the one adopted by the Navajo Indian tribes20 who agreed to a two per cent tax increase on calorific food, to counter a high incidence of diabetes in their community? This law was preceded in 2014 by a decreased tax on fresh vegetables and fruits. The key in our daily diet will not just be the calorie count, but how many middle suppliers we manage to cut out by way of additives, preservatives and enhancers. ‘Get Wealthy, Eat Healthy’ may be the angioplasty that will save emerging India.
References
Diabetes Atlas, 6th Edition, International Diabetes Federation, 2013.
Anne Gibbons, ‘The Evolution of Diet’, National Geographic magazine, September 2014,
Ruth Graham, Boston Globe, 13 October 2013.
Tara Parker, ‘Diabetes: Underrated, Insidious and Deadly’, The New York Times, 1 July 2008.
Kasia Lipska, ‘The Global Diabetes Epidemic’, The New York Times, 25 April 2014.
Menaka Rao, ‘How to Live and Die on the New Dharavi Diet’, Grist Media.
http://www.crisil.com/about-crisil/Fast-Food-in-Fast-Lane.html
http://www.pepsicoindia.co.in/Download/India%20Pledge.pdf
http://www.dsir.gov.in/reports/techreps/tsr150.pdf
http://vegetarianstar.com/2011/06/06/jamie-oliver-makesice-cream-sundae-with-bugs-human-hair-video/