Eating habits, cooking habits, cuisines have changed, are changing, across the country, across social strata, across the rural-urban divide. And for anybody's money, it isn't a change to inspire confidence in the future of public health.
Sample this. Ria Ghosh, a 14 year old who lives in south Delhi's Chittaranjan Park, doesn't have the antipathy to eating that a lot of teenagers do, she likes to tuck in. On an average school day she has herbal tea and porridge, Quaker oats with milk to be precise, for breakfast. On a bright Tuesday in February, she followed this up with a hot dog and scraps from a friend's lunch
paratha and potato chilli at school, washed down with an iced tea from the canteen. At home she had rice with
daal, and mutton and potato curry for both lunch and dinner. In-between snacks consisted of four bars of Snickers, an apple and some cake. And, of course, there was the ubiquitous chewing gum.
The same day, 35-year-old Vinod Kumar Jaiswal, a
tabla teacher in nearby East of Kailash, had four pieces of bread with a double-egg omelette and milk with Bournvita for breakfast. For lunch, he had rice with fish curry, fried potatoes, beans and egg curry. After an evening snack of
pakoras, he finished the day with
chapatis and
daal, a single-egg omelette, salad and
papad. During the day, he had five cups of tea and two cups of coffee. Like Ria, he also had chocolate. "Five eggs a day are a must," he says. He has fruits on alternate days.
A homemaker based in Chittaranjan Park is the archetype of an exasperated mother. Her 13-year-old son's eating habits drives her nuts. "We have to buy a lot of junk food for him. He just refuses to have the normal rice-and-
daal meal. He has cakes and biscuit in the morning, pizzas or Maggi at lunch and
paratha at night. This he supplements with liberal doses of soft drinks," she says. Recently, the family holidayed in Darjeeling,
staying in a forest bungalow where junk food was not available. The boy's father had to trek into town a long way just to get junk food. Not that he is any better, she says. He doesn't like vegetarian food. If there is no meat on the table, the dissatisfaction shows.
Awareness trap
There are people who are aware of the need to balance their diets. But that doesn't necessarily help. A homemaker in Gurgaon sends her five-year-old daughter to school with Kellogs choco biscuits and a slice of cheese, believing these are better than the chips and assorted junk other kids eat. "We are allowed to eat junk food only on Wednesdays and Fridays," says 13-year-old Mehak Paul, who lives in south Delhi's Greater Kailash-I. On these days, she and her 10-year-old brother Mohak have instant noodles.
A lot of people who are under the illusion that they are eating healthy are not, actually. Prithi Pais, a fashion designer in Bangalore, tries to stick to a balanced diet. But convenience is also important in her hectic lifestyle. So, she's forced to take recourse to the supermarket. Packaged food like pasta, cheese, biscuits, chocolates, fruit juices, packaged vegetables and curd are staples on her shopping list. But she avoids food rich in fats, especially the more deadly variety, transfats.
Dipankar Ghosh and Chitralekha Basu in Kolkata have a similar story. Both are media persons. Ghosh is an art director with an English daily and Basu is a freelance journalist. She works during the day; his workday starts at 4 pm. The only home-cooked meal they have together during the week is breakfast, often comprising eggs, toast and cured meats. Given their schedules, eating out is rare, once in two months at best.
The couple usually has two home-cooked meals a day. She skips lunch, and he skips dinner or makes do with a quick snack. "We try to follow a normal food habit but we don't have time," says Ghosh. Basu admits that sometimes they do end up buying soup concentrates or instant
upma and other pre-cooked and packaged food, even though they know it's not very healthy. They try to stick to healthy food. Veggies and fish, are a regular fixture. "We use very little oil and a lot of the food is just boiled or steamed and lightly sauted," says Ghosh.
While the couple is more aware of the difference between healthy and unhealthy foods, it doesn't stop them from indulging in bad food habits. "We balance out our health food with junk food," says Ghosh.
The balance is clearly shifting. As traditional, and usually more calibrated, cuisines take a beating, traditional skills, too, become obsolescent. When her husband was still working, Lahari Guha spent long hours in the kitchen, preparing every meal the family ate, served fresh. They didn't own a fridge, so her husband would shop vegetables and fish daily.
Now, the 66-year-old widow only enters the kitchen when she wants to prepare a special dish or two for her son Rahul or 12-year-old granddaughter, Gandharbi. Her daughter-in-law, Manjari, takes care of the rest, aided by a fridge stocked with pre-cooked and instant foods. Inevitably, traditional Bengali cuisine faces stiff competition. Both her son and granddaughter love to eat out at least once or twice a month.
Not that eating home food is a guaranteed recipe for good gastronomic habits. Illusions play their role here as well. Manjul Mathur, a doctor in west Delhi's Karol Bagh area, points out, for instance, that the widespread perception that refined oil is harmless has had deleterious health impacts. First, the jury is still out on these oils. Second, this perception has increased oil intake, which is unequivocally unhealthy.
Across the board
It's not just the rich who eat badly. In the resettlement colony in Madanpur Khadar, near the south Delhi-Haryana border, Suman Devi, whose husband earns Rs 3,500 per month as a mechanic, feeds her family of five bread, rusks or biscuits with tea for breakfast. Lunch is rice with
daal or
chapatis with vegetables. But her youngest son, six-year-old Prince, loves packaged food. Two or three packets of biscuits a day is normal. The children also save pocket money for
namkeens and biscuits, says Suman. In the same area, 50-year-old Phulwati's husband runs a small shop. Her children regularly pick up tidbits from local shops--both for novelty value and status.
It's a similar story in Kolkata. Almost every morning, before she rushes off to prepare breakfast for the family she works for, Ruma Ghosh serves her seven-year-old daughter, Papiya a packet of Maggi noodles, chicken flavour. "I'm always in a rush in the morning and don't have time to make her eat. She likes Maggi, so she eats it on her own, five or six times a week," says Ghosh. It used to be more, but a-year-and-a-half ago, Papiya had an allergy that weakened her digestive system. Since then Ghosh has cut back on Maggi. Papiya's other favourite foods include orange cream and chocolate biscuits. "Lot of people say Maggi isn't good and I shouldn't give her too much. Sometimes Papiya can't digest it and is sick," says Ghosh. But that doesn't seem to deter her. Not when she sees the families she works in, eating the same thing.
Ghosh works as a housemaid and a cook in three houses in the morning and two in the evening. She and her husband, a construction worker, earn about Rs 5,500 a month between them. They don't indulge in the luxury of Maggi. Breakfast for them is tea and biscuits or leftover
rotis or nothing. Lunch and dinner are regular fare:
masoor daal, a vegetable and a curry of fresh small fish or omelettes. Dinner is the main meal. In winters, it's
daal, vegetable and
rotis. In summer, rice replaces
roti.
Whether she and her family are eating healthy or not, isn't a question that crosses Ghosh's mind, which is understandable because their diet wouldn't really pass a nutrition test.
This holds true for Kalyani Koundar's family as well. Koundar hasn't made the transition to buying processed food for a simple reason--she can't afford it. In fact, nutritionally speaking she is worse off than the Ghoshes. Kounder lives in a
jhuggi cluster near Tuglaqabad fort, south Delhi. On food, she spends around Rs 2,000 of the Rs 5,000 she earns a month cleaning utensils in nearby homes for her family of four. Meaning, 40 per cent of the family's earnings is spent on food, which is close to the 42 per cent average estimated by the 61st round of the National Sample Survey Organisation's (
nsso's) survey, the report for which came out in December 2006. People who earn around what Koundar earns are inevitably victims of underconsumption, by any nutritional standard. Her purchases for a month include 42 kg of rice, 1 kg of pulses, 1 kg of oil, 3 kg of sugar and 7.5 kg of vegetables. The main food is rice with vegetables into which she puts in a handful of
daal. Non-vegetarian food is eaten twice a month; she's never bought fruit. But even her family eats processed food: bread she gets from homes she works in and a temple.
Changing priorities
Changing diets are reflected in changing shopping lists. Bottles of mayonnaise, sandwich spread, stir fry sauce, instant
idli mix, noodles and cake mixes, pre-packed
daal makhani and
pav bhaji jostle for space with breads, deep-fried
namkeens and assorted biscuits on the narrow countertop of Kamal Dutta's grocery and general goods store (see table:
India eating). "Instant food sells the most these days, especially Maggi," says Dutta, who's been running a store in south Kolkata for over 30 years. Bread is a top seller. Quite a few people now ask for brown bread, so Dutta keeps a few varieties. Earlier, customers would shop for staples--flour, pulses, rice--but instant foods have taken over, he says. "What families eat now is not dependent on parents anymore," he says. "It's all up to the kids and what they want and what they want is what they watch in
tv ads. Also, it's convenient for working mothers."
Dinesh Kumar, owner of a small provisions shop in Madanpur Khadar, has also noticed the change. People now buy a lot of bread, rusk and
matthi (a fried savoury snack) for breakfast because they don't have time to cook in the morning, he says. They also buy biscuits and Maggi noodles.
No nutrition
All these diets fall woefully short of the Indian Council of Medical Research's dietary guidelines, except perhaps for the calorie count. The guidelines suggest minimising packaged food, white bread and fried food and recommends pulses, fresh fruit and vegetables.
who's 2004 recommendations on diet, health and physical activity, too, remain a wish list. It suggested the only way to curb chronic diseases was to increase consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables, and decrease that of sugar, salt and oil, all commonly found in processed foods.
Take any of the examples given above. All these diets are rich in fats and carbohydrates, apart from harmful chemicals in the form of "permitted colouring agents", preservatives and other agents. At the same time, they are short of proteins, vitamins, minerals and fibres. These diets are out of line.
Unfortunately, most people fail to understand that a balanced, homemade meal is not just more nutritious, it is also cheaper. Saurabh Gulati, 26, a Delhi trader started balancing his diet around five years ago when his parents became health conscious. "We snack on dry fruits or fruits and have home-cooked food, avoiding oil," he says. The family of five and a one-and-a-half-year-old child have a lot of seasonal vegetables and fruit, spending about Rs 9,000 per month. Compare this to the Rs 6,500 per month Pais spends on her family of two.
Food mauls
It is this ignorance, or, at the very least, apathy, that the food industry exploits. Urban middle-class India is emptying its pockets in supermarkets and restaurants, making for a dizzy growth in this sector. The numbers relating to shopping for ready-to-eat, or almost ready-to eat, food are completely of a piece with the changing dietary habits we have noted.
As Rashmi Mahajan of Jangpura Extension pays for the grocery at the Big Apple supermarket outlet in East of Kailash, she happily chats with her daughter about her plans to serve
pav bhaji that evening. She had bought two packets of Kohinoor's heat-and-eat Mumbai
pav bhaji mix and a packet of
pav (bread). She also bought Amul cheese slices, Gatorade (lemon and orange), Maggi noodles, Fun Food
kebab dip, Fun Food Caesar salad dressing, Maggi soup (tomato, mushroom), Kellogs corn flakes, Kohinoor
paneer tikka daal and
daal makhani. This constituted 40 per cent of her shopping (Rs 741 of Rs 1,858). She spent just Rs 163 on fresh vegetables.
Big Apple is just one of the food malls mushrooming all over urban India. Growth in large-scale retailing in developing countries has coincided with new investments by foreign food manufacturers.
A January-2004 Confederation of Indian Industry-McKinsey report predicts that by 2008, some retailers will top the Rs 1,000-crore mark. During 2002-03, retailers like Foodworld, Subhiksha, Big Bazar and Super Sabka Bazar made Rs 363 crore, Rs 265 crore, Rs 175 crore and Rs 120 crore. The malls focus on a market consisting of middle and upper classes, stocking value-added convenience food products--higher-end biscuits, dairy products like cheese, butter and flavoured milk, sauces, pastas and breakfast cereals.
At Subhiksha, a discount retail chain, anything between 5 and 25 per cent can be saved. For example, Kissan orange jam with a maximum retail price of Rs 65 is sold for Rs 60.13 a saving of 7.5 per cent. On Priya Gold Butter Bite biscuits, there is a saving of 10 per cent, on Uncle Chipps, 15 per cent. But on a necessity like
moong daal, there is a saving of only 7 per cent and on Brooke Bond Red Label tea only 5 per cent. The first Subhiksha store opened in 1997. The company plans a store every three kilometres in the cities they are operating in. The chain has already crossed the 450-store mark across five states and hopes to increase this to 1,000 by end-2007.
The big picture is revealing. Semi-processed, cooked and ready-to-eat foods are flying off the shelves. An excise duty cut from 16 per cent to 8 per cent has helped. The market was estimated at around Rs 8,290 crore in 2004-2005.
Gagan Malik, part-owner of Morning Stores in Greater Kailash-I, south Delhi, has a reason for the popularity of ready-to-eat food. "People are travelling more and they carry ready-to-eat stuff," he says. The same products failed to take off when they were launched a decade back, he adds.
Eating Out
Unhealthy eating habits at home are being buttressed by an increasing tendency to eat out at fast food joints. A number of factors contribute: among them rising disposable incomes in urban middle-class India, brand pull and plain convenience.
At a McDonald's outlet in Connaught Place, New Delhi, there are loads of people who've sorted their systems out--going there on a regular basis helps. Groups have a division of labour. One member queues to place orders, the rest fan out to keep an eye on the one thing that is in the shortest supply: space to sit. That's expending a lot of time and energy for a meal that's hardly a meal. The cheapest burger costs just Rs 20. But it has a calorie content of around 350 kcal. While fats, carbohydrates and some proteins account for half that, the remaining is a mystery. The spokesperson for McDonald's in Delhi says it consists of "fibres and other elements". Whatever it may contain, the Rs 20 burger can hardly satisfy the hunger of a child, forget an adult.
Nevertheless, Indians are spending close to Rs 4,449 crore a year at fast-food joints. The fast-food market in India is growing at 40 per cent a year. According to a survey by consultants AC Nielsen, an adult, urban Indian is among the top 10 in the world in terms of the number of times he or she has a fast-food meal.
A 2004 report authored by the Confederation of Indian Industry and consultants McKinsey said McDonald's earned Rs 125 crore followed by the Indian chain Nirula's at Rs 100 crore and Pizza Hut at Rs 60 crore. Smaller shops also do good business. Top Breads, a food outlet in NOIDA, Uttar Pradesh, is a favourite hangout for working people. "They eat fried chicken, salads, burgers, cheese macaroni, grilled chicken, sandwiches, or cutlets," says Ginni, the proprietor. Fast food outlets cater to people like copywriter Sourabh Mookherjee who live alone. "I hate fast food. But sometimes nothing else is available," he says. Mookherjee eats out everyday, spending Rs 200-500.
There are many drivers behind the eating out phenomenon, however. Convenience is one of them, entertainment is another. Especially with the growing predominance of nuclear families and working parents. Gargi and Chinmoy Bose of Kolkata dine out with their two little boys--Jojo, 7, and Josh, 5--at least once a week, maybe twice. "Actually, it's not so much about eating as it is about taking Gargi and the children on an outing," says Chinmoy, who's a software engineer in an established it firm.
When eating at home, Gargi tries to ensure her boys have their required calorie intake. She cooks healthy meals of rice,
roti, vegetables,
daal and fish. But the kids are fussy eaters and would rather have pizza and noodles. However, Gargi is not so much into calorie counting when it comes to herself and Chinmoy eats out often. But he tries to stick to light, less oily dishes.
The explosion in the eating out phenomenon is largely being driven by the popularity of fast food. The number of fast food outlets has grown exponentially in the last few years (see map:
All over). The leaders, McDonald's, opened their first restaurant in October 1996 at Basant Lok, Vasant Vihar, New Delhi. Now they have 105 restaurants in India; 55 of these have opened in the last two years. McDonald's feeds 350,000 customers per day in India out of the 50 million customers it caters to every day internationally. That works out to an astounding 7 per cent. The company's nearest competitor is Pizza Hut, owned by Pepsico's Yum Restaurants International, which opened its first outlet in India in 1996 in Bangalore. In 2001, it had only 29 restaurants, which increased to 127 in 2006. This year, the company recorded a sale of Rs 30 crore, with its market share going up from 15 per cent in 2000 to 28 per cent in 2006, according to media reports. Yum now plans to invest heavily, Rs 100 crore, in its two brands, KFC and Pizza Hut. The number of Pizza Hut outlets is set to increase to 150 with a special focus on smaller cities.
Domino's has an annual expansion expenditure of Rs 6.6 crore in India and plans to add 30 more outlets in 2007 to the existing 105. Papa John's opened its first outlet in Gurgaon last April and plans to set up 100 more in north India. Subway opened its first outlet in Delhi in 2001 and plans to invest over Rs 177.1 crore to increase the number to 200 by 2009, from the present 65 outlets. Two more chains--Starbucks, which is entering the food sector, and Burger King--are entering the market this year.
Coffee chains have also become a craze. There are an estimated 500 cafs in the organised sector. Industry analysts say this could increase to 5,000. The Rs 664.1-crore Ravi Jaipuria group has brought the Costa coffee brand to India. Barista, one of the most popular chains, has over 150 outlets in over 27 cities.
But what's striking is that it's not just the big brands. Smaller, local chains are also prospering. From one shop in 1991 to 108 in Kolkata and its suburbs in 2007, Monginis sells inexpensive cakes, pastries, pizzas and other savoury food. Arnab Basu, Monginis's managing director, says the company had a Rs 53 lakh turnover in its first year. That's grown to Rs 50 crore. Savouries rake in the most, says Basu. "Health-wise we put out more untopped cakes and that is popular," says Basu. "The younger crowd is being exposed to western food. There's a growing desire for non-fattening food. But that's expensive. We give a cheap choice."
This holds true for Kalyani Koundar's family as well. Koundar hasn't made the transition to buying processed food for a simple reason--she can't afford it. In fact, nutritionally speaking she is worse off than the Ghoshes. Kounder lives in a jhuggi cluster near Tuglaqabad fort, south Delhi. On food, she spends around Rs 2,000 of the Rs 5,000 she earns a month cleaning utensils in nearby homes for her family of four. Meaning, 40 per cent of the family's earnings is spent on food, which is close to the 42 per cent average estimated by the 61st round of the National Sample Survey Organisation's (nsso's) survey, the report for which came out in December 2006. People who earn around what Koundar earns are inevitably victims of underconsumption, by any nutritional standard. Her purchases for a month include 42 kg of rice, 1 kg of pulses, 1 kg of oil, 3 kg of sugar and 7.5 kg of vegetables. The main food is rice with vegetables into which she puts in a handful of daal. Non-vegetarian food is eaten twice a month; she's never bought fruit. But even her family eats processed food: bread she gets from homes she works in and a temple.
The price-nutrition dynamic plays out differentially in the developed and developing worlds. In the former, as a number of studies have noted, fast food constitutes a much greater proportion of the diet of the poor. In the us, for instance, this correlation maps on to an ethnic divide: the minorities--Afro-Americans, Hispanics and Asians--tend to consume more junk food. In developing countries, on the other hand, the dynamic is different. The poor are undernourished in absolute terms, because they have a much more constricted option of cheap food even if it is nutritionally poor.
million tonnes in 2004-2005, the bread industry had a growth rate of 10 per cent during 1990-2000, which fell to 6.5 per cent during 2000-2005. To increase this, the All India Bread Manufacturers Association suggested bread should be included in mid-day meal schemes for school children.
