More, but Less

On full plates and empty calories

I recently went on holiday to Australia, and one of the things I was most excited about was the food. I had heard that Melbourne has the highest number of family owned coffee shops and the coffee experience is unparalleled. It didn’t disappoint. If anyone wants a complete food and coffee itinerary for Melbourne, hit me up. The grocery stores? A dream. I’m now at the age where a well-stocked grocery aisle makes me unreasonably happy. The berries, the veggies, the dairy - all of it was top notch. I’m someone with a very sensitive stomach, and drinking regular milk coffee upsets my stomach. I’d filed myself under “lactose intolerant” and moved on. But I was running on 4 coffees with full cream milk before 2 pm in Australia and I didn’t have to make constant dashes to the restroom.

I came back to Bangalore thinking I’d solved my issues through exposure therapy, but I was instantly humbled. Why did my stomach feel funny right after my first coffee back home? Why do the vegetables and fruits look smaller, less colourful and kind of sad? I’ve lived in Bangalore for most of my life and somehow, embarrassingly, only now have I started to pay attention to this.

Some of this is nostalgia, obviously. Travel makes everything taste better. There is novelty, excitement, discovery, joy. But this nagging thought never left my head. It’s obvious there’s a difference in the food we eat in India versus the food we eat abroad. But how stark is the difference, really? Today we dive down yet another endlessly layered rabbithole of the nutrition landscape of India.

The Gap

For a long time, we’ve peddled the narrative that home-cooked meals are healthier and better than eating out. Is that actually true, though? Indian food is, on average, more adulterated, more pesticide laden and more nutritionally hollow than what you’d find in the west. It is well documented. FSSAI’s own data, placed before Parliament, found that roughly one in five food samples tested in 2024-25 failed to meet required standards. That’s the national average. In Uttar Pradesh, 52.8% failed. In Rajasthan, 28.4%. It’s to be noted that “failed” bundles together three different things: truly unsafe, merely substandard, and badly labelled. The truly unsafe slice is smaller. When FSSAI specifically tested for pesticide residues over 2022-25, about 2.8% of samples crossed the limit. So this is a country where one in five samples is off in some way, ranging from dangerous to just dishonest, and where the system treats that as normal.

There’s milk, which deserves its own paragraph because it’s where the panic is loudest and the facts are most abused. You’ll have seen the claim that most Indian milk is adulterated, often pinned to a “68%” figure. That number comes from a 2011 survey FSSAI itself later threw out for shoddy methodology. The proper study, the National Milk Safety and Quality Survey 2018, tested 6,432 samples across the country and found that exactly 12 of them carried urea, detergent, hydrogen peroxide, the adulteration that actually makes milk unsafe. FSSAI called the result a myth-buster. However, the same survey found about 5.7% of samples carrying aflatoxin M1, a carcinogen that gets into milk through contaminated cattle feed, plus antibiotic residues above permissible limits, and roughly 41% of samples falling short on basic quality like fat and solids content. This is a supply chain problem: poor feed, casual antibiotic use, and milk that’s been watered down or skimmed somewhere between the cow and our kitchen, mostly in the unregulated local trade where most Indians actually buy milk. This is less dramatic, but far harder to fix, as it runs several layers deep.

The same pattern shows up in packaged food, and one example is properly documented. In 2024, the Swiss investigative group Public Eye, with the International Baby Food Action Network, tested baby-food products and found that Nestlé’s Cerelac sold in India carried added sugar, around 3g a serving across all 15 Indian variants, while the very same brand is sold with no added sugar in the UK, Germany and Switzerland. Nestlé’s defence was that recipes vary with local taste and regulation, and it has since said it’s rolling out no-added-sugar options. Make of that what you will. The point is that the gap between what gets sold to a rich market and what gets sold to a price-sensitive one exists and is not paranoia. It has been measured, at least once, in a product made for six-month-olds.

The part that I keep coming back to is the inequity of it all. The person writing this article and perhaps the person reading it, can probably notice the difference, because we have something to compare it against. We buy the FSSAI-regulated packaged milk, or we can afford the cleaner option, or we’ve just been somewhere the food was better. The people carrying the real weight of a degraded food system are the ones for whom the cheaper, less-regulated option isn’t a choice, it’s the only thing the budget allows. Any honest conversation about food quality in India has to start there, because the obvious fixes like stricter rules, cleaner inputs, etc., all cost money, and that cost lands hardest on the people with the least.

Eating More, Eating Emptier

The statistics on malnutrition in India are numbers we’ve skimmed through and the actual magnitude is sometimes lost.

The National Family Health Survey found that 57% of Indian women aged 15-49 are anaemic. Not iron deficient, anaemic. 67% percent of children under five. These numbers from some 2019-21, not some distant historical era we read about in our school history textbooks. The trend line for children has actually worsened between survey cycles. One in every two women you see on the street is likely carrying a hemoglobin deficit that is affecting her energy, her cognition, her pregnancy outcomes, her capacity to do any of the physical labor that much of this country runs on.

What causes anaemia at this scale? Some of it is hookworm, sanitation and genetics. A lot of it is simply food, specifically the absence of iron, folate and B12 in what people eat day after day. The newest consumption data tells the story clearly. The Household Consumption Expenditure Survey put the rural calorie requirement at about 2,172 a day. The poorest 5% of rural India eats roughly 1,600. Overwhelmingly carbohydrate heavy, very little protein and almost no fresh vegetables or pulses, hence micronutrient deficient. Not only are they eating less, but they are also eating emptier. This is what a diet built around PDS rice and wheat, with very little animal protein, pulses, or fresh vegetables, looks like in the body over time. It looks like a child who’s too short for their age, slow to think, prone to infection. Like a pregnant woman whose baby is born underweight and stays that way. Like a country that has enough calories on paper and is still starving in ways that don’t show up as famine.

So that’s why the “just raise food quality” argument doesn’t hold. Raising food quality almost always means raising prices, and for a household spending 60% of its income on food (normal in rural India), a 10-15% increase in the cost of staples subtracts from an already inadequate number of meals.

The People Who Can’t Afford A Fix

The cruelest thing about India’s food quality problem is that the people most short-changed by the current system are the same people who’d be hurt most by cleaning it up too fast.

If we ban adulterated milk, enforcement at scale would overnight eliminate a massive share of available supply, which in turn would push prices up sharply. The farmer watering down his milk is doing it because his input costs have risen, not because he’s a bad person. The price he gets from middlemen hasn’t risen and the dilution is how he covers his margins. Remove that option and he needs either a price increase passed to consumers, or he exits the market, or he goes under. All of those paths end with less affordable dairy for the people already at the bottom.

The same applies to the street vendor frying samosas in adulterated and used cooking oil, the small processor using synthetic colors because natural ones cost three times as much and the grain trader adding filler because the margin on clean grain doesn’t work at the price points the market will bear. They are the estimated 10 million street food vendors and millions of small processors who constitute the informal food economy that feeds the majority of the country. They are not separate from the problem; they are survival adaptations to a system that was never designed with quality as a viable option for them.

When food inflation hit 10.9% in October 2024, it drove rural inflation to a 14-month high. In rural households, food already consumes 50-60% of the budget. Wage growth for rural workers has been negative in real terms for most of the last decade. Against that backdrop, “pay a premium for quality” is advice from a different planet.

Where Are Our Pitchforks?

In a lot of countries, a food system that routinely degrades milk, leaves two in three children anaemic, and loses a sizeable share of every harvest before it reaches a plate would generate sustained political fury. Here, as with most things, we get outraged in cycles, and then it subsides. Why?

Part of this is visibility. Adulteration and substandard produce make you sick slowly. Anemia builds over months and pesticides accumulate over years. Governments are not held accountable for slow deaths the way they are for sudden ones.

Another part of this is that the state has effectively conflated enough food with good food in the public psyche. PDS, or the Public Distribution Scheme, which is a program designed to distribute essential food grains and non-food commodities to economically vulnerable sections of society at highly subsidized rates, is a commendable achievement. And because it works, it becomes the proof that food is “handled.” The much harder thing to say out loud is that the grain it distributes is nutritionally thin, and that we’ve engineered a population that is calorie-sufficient and micronutrient-deficient. That’s a slow, invisible failure layered on top of a visible success, which is very hard to campaign against.

Part of it is just that this is all anyone has ever known. When the milk from the local vendor and the vegetables from the mandi have always been a bit suspect, “outrage” doesn’t attach to it. We adapt. We boil everything. We treat a baseline of uncertainty as the price of eating. The middle class, which has the loudest voice, has mostly opted out of the worst of it rather than fight to fix it, which is understandable given how regularly that same middle class gets squeezed by everything else, time and time again.

Finally, part of it is that the political economy actively punishes accountability. Any government that tries to seriously enforce food standards overnight risks shutting down the informal food economy that feeds the poor and employs the vulnerable. You enforce quality, and you lose elections and send a huge chunk of the population into hunger. You delay enforcement, and people get sick slowly, over decades, not overnight. Either way, there’s no clean political win, so the rational move is to do neither with any conviction.

The Money Exists, The Will Doesn’t

One might think that this could be a poverty problem, given we are a “poor” country. It isn’t. India spends about ₹1.68 lakh crore annually on fertilizer subsidies, with urea alone accounting for about ₹1.19 lakh crore. This subsidy systematically overloads soil with nitrogen, degrades land quality over time, and flows disproportionately to larger farmers rather than the small, marginal farmers it exists for. The food security budget under PDS runs to over ₹2 lakh crore; enormous money, almost entirely focused on quantity, that is calories delivered, grain distributed, numbers met.

It ignores nutrition. It does not build cold-chain infrastructure which is the backbone to prevent food spoilage during transportation. Only about 3.5% of India’s perishables travel in refrigerated transport, against roughly 75% in China and 85% in the US. The result is that 25-30% of fruits and vegetables, grown by farmers who worked to produce them, rot or degrade before they reach a consumer in edible form. The farmer bears this as lost income. The consumer bears it as worse produce. And the government books it as an invisible cost rather than an infrastructure debt that can be repaid.

If India was to redirect even a part of the subsidy away from urea, rice and wheat to more nutritionally complete produce like pulses and vegetables, dairy infrastructure and testing, the needle could be moved. But this is a huge political bloc. It would upset constituencies that represent hundreds of millions of votes. The FSSAI has regulations on paper, but the number of labs in India which are equipped to test for heavy metals and more advanced testing are drastically smaller than the required amount. The government raises revenue threshold for mandatory FSSAI registration which exempts more small businesses from oversight. There are no periodic inspection touchpoints, and enforcement is lax.

The Human Capital That Arrives With Interest

When we discuss the long-term health benefits of clean food, we often default to superficial wellness jargon. The reality is far colder and more damaging to India’s future.

India is now a global capital of type-2 diabetes and heart disease, and while genetics play a part, a large part of it is that we’ve swapped real ingredients for cheap carbohydrates, sugar and industrial oils, and started doing it early in life. The consumption data backs the direction of travel: we’re eating more or less the same number of calories as before, but not better ones, and the quality gap is widening between the top and bottom of the distribution. That’s the setup for a metabolic problem that compounds for thirty years. The cost of managing chronic disease at national scale over the coming decades will dwarf the cost of fixing the farm and the supply chain now. We’re saving pennies at the farm gate to spend fortunes in the ICU. Clean food is the baseline requirement for maintaining a functional human immune system.

How To Fix??

Doom is cheap and easy, and it’s also useless. I don’t want to simply keep pointing out issues without providing viable alternatives. The encouraging thing is that we mostly know what to do, and a fair bit of it is already in motion. All of it is achievable, and most of it is sequenced so it doesn’t crush the people at the bottom on the way up.

Make the cheap food carry more nutrition

The fastest method is to load more nutrition into what we already eat. Biofortified crop varieties (iron-rich pearl millet, zinc-rich wheat, protein-richer staples bred by ICAR) cost roughly the same to grow. Folding millets back into the PDS and mid-day meals does the same, and the 2023 millet push gave that effort actual momentum. Fortification of staples can help, though it should be done with care and proper screening for populations where it interacts with conditions like sickle cell, rather than as a rolling nationwide mandate.

Diversify the safety net beyond grain

PDS was built to defeat hunger, and it did. The next version has to defeat hidden hunger. That means pulses, eggs and milk reaching the people who need protein most, channelled through schemes that already exist. Several states already put eggs in school meals, with measurable results on child nutrition.

Fix the incentive to cheat

Adulteration and dilution are mostly economic decisions made by people with thin margins. Better farm-gate prices, stronger farmer producer organisations, and more direct procurement that cuts out the squeeze of the middleman all reduce the reason to water down milk or mess with the grain in the first place. Enforcement works far better as the follow on move than the first one.

Build the cold chain

This is the unsexy infrastructure that pays for itself in produce that doesn’t rot. The interesting shift is that it no longer has to mean giant grid-powered warehouses. Solar-powered, modular cold storage placed at the farm and the mandi lets small farmers hold produce through a price crash and cuts spoilage without a massive fuel bill. There are a lot of startups working on cold-chain solutions and I would like to speak to all of you! It’s one of the rare interventions that helps the farmer’s income, the consumer’s plate and the climate all at once.

Make testing cheap, fast and everywhere

We don’t have enough labs for heavy metals and advanced contaminants, and that’s a big budget ask. But a lot of basic adulteration can be caught with rapid, low-cost kits. FSSAI already publishes simple detection methods. Pushing those down to the vendor, the cooperative and the household turns a centralised bottleneck into millions of small checkpoints.

Bring the informal economy up, don’t shut it down

The street vendor and the small processor aren’t the enemy of safe food, they’re the only food a huge share of the country can afford. The humane path is shared infrastructure (clean water, common processing and cold storage, cheap access to quality oil and inputs), training, and gentle, supported formalisation, so quality rises without the livelihood disappearing. Enforcement that simply raids the poor out of business is both cruel and politically suicidal, which is why it never sticks.

Tilt the subsidy, slowly

Nobody sane proposes gutting urea support overnight. Gradually rebalancing the enormous fertiliser and staples budget toward nutrition (pulses, horticulture, dairy infrastructure, soil health) while protecting farmers with direct cash transfers is doable, and it’s been recommended for years. The block is political, not financial, and political blocks move when the public pushes the goalpost.

Closing Thoughts

The food many of us eat here genuinely is more variable, more degraded along the chain, and thinner on nutrition than what’s sold in a rich country with tight oversight and a short, cold supply chain. That’s not a moral failing of Indian food or Indian cooking, which remain among the best things about being alive here. It’s a systems failure, and systems can be fixed.

We have the money. We have the playbook. We even have a lot of it already running. What we mostly lack is the patience to value better over more, and the spine to mean it for everyone, not just for the people who can holiday somewhere with nicer berries.