The halwai is raided for adulterated laddoos, the engineered snacks get a shelf

This festival season, India is destroying tonnes of adulterated sweets, and rightly so. But as a food technologist, I keep noticing what the raids can never see: the perfectly legal, exquisitely engineered snack that harms far more of us, far more slowly, and never fails a single test.In Prayagraj this festival season, a bulldozer crushed more than 10,000 kilograms of sweets into the ground. In Hyderabad, inspectors carried away some 15 tonnes of mithai and namkeen from units where the pests had arrived before the customers. Across Odisha, over a single weekend in late August, 30 districts surrendered 3,605 kilograms of stale and adulterated food, and 475 samples went to the laboratory. In Ludhiana, thousands of litres of counterfeit ghee were poured away.It is a familiar spectacle, and a reassuring one. The villain is easy to picture: the halwai with the filthy tub, the godown with the forged label, the man who stirs a banned chemical into your child’s Diwali box. The raid asks him one sharp question, the only question our food law has ever really known how to ask.What have you put in this that should not be there?It is a good question. It is simply not the only one worth asking. As a food technologist, I suspect we are asking the wrong people. THE ONE QUESTION OUR LAW KNOWS HOW TO ASKUnder the Food Safety and Standards Act, food becomes unsafe in a handful of classic ways: a poison is added, a cheaper substance is substituted for a dearer one, a colour hides decay, filth creeps in during processing, or something is taken out that should have stayed. Read that list and you see the mind behind it. It is the mind of the 19th-century inspector, and its founding assumption is that danger is a foreign thing, smuggled in.So the whole apparatus is built to compare two lists. What should be in this food, and what has actually been put into it? Milk should not contain detergent. Ghee should not contain vanaspati. A sweet should not contain textile bleach. Find the gap between the two lists and you have found the crime. This is adulteration, and it is real, and I do not want a single raid called off. But notice the question it cannot ask. What happens when nothing illegal has been added at all, when every ingredient is permitted, every limit respected, every label lawful, and the finished product is still quietly bad for the people who eat it every day?That is the question modern food has walked in with. Our law does not yet have the vocabulary to hear it.WHAT A RAID CAN SEEConsider what the inspector is trained to catch, because the chemistry is genuinely frightening and genuinely acute.Take sodium formaldehyde sulfoxylate, the industrial bleaching agent that keeps surfacing in seized milk cake and paneer. It is a formaldehyde donor, meaning that with a little heat or acid, it releases formaldehyde, a substance the World Health Organization's cancer agency classes in Group 1, its highest tier of proven human carcinogens. It is used to whiten discoloured milk solids and fake freshness.It has no business anywhere near food. Or take the detergent and caustic soda whipped into synthetic milk to hold cheap oil in suspension, or metanil yellow, a non-permitted dye splashed into laddoos, which the gut can convert into toxic aromatic amines.These are acute hazards with a clear culprit and a clean test. A sample, a laboratory, a result, a seizure. The law works exactly as designed, and it should. My argument is not that this danger is imaginary. It is that it is the smaller half of the story, and the visible half, and therefore the half that gets all the cameras.WHAT A RAID CANNOT SEENow walk from the seized godown to the bright, air-conditioned aisle, and pick up a packet that will never be raided.It contains no banned substance. Every emulsifier, colour, sweetener and preservative in it sits on an approved list, within legal limits. It will pass every test the inspector can run. And it may still be, by the nutritional thresholds India's own scientists have published, a food high in fat, sugar and salt, engineered for consumption on a scale no rasgulla made by a halwai ever managed.Here I have to say the thing food technologists are always reluctant to say in public, because it is so easily misused. Processing itself is not the enemy. Pasteurisation is processing. So are fermentation, milling, freezing, drying, canning and fortification, and between them, they have saved more lives than any inspector, by killing pathogens, preventing spoilage and carrying nutrition across a vast and hungry country. The word "processed" is not a slur. The honest question is never whether food is engineered. It is what engineering has been asked to optimise for.And there lies the modern problem, which is not fraud but design. When the objective is maximum palatability, maximum convenience and maximum shelf life, the food that results can be flawless on paper and still work against the body that eats it. The category has a name in nutrition science, the ultra-processed food, defined under the NOVA classification, a Brazilian system that groups food not by its nutrients but by the degree and purpose of its processing: an industrial formulation of cheap extracted substances and cosmetic additives, built to be irresistible. India's own dietary guidelines now warn about exactly these foods.THE COLLAPSE OF THE MATRIXTo see how a legal food can still betray you, hold an orange in one hand and a glass of orange juice in the other.The nutrients are nearly the same. The physics could not be more different. The orange makes you work: you tear the peel, you chew, the fibre and the intact cell walls slow everything down, and the sugar arrives in your blood as a trickle. The juice asks nothing of you. It is gone in seconds, and the same sugar arrives as a flood.Food scientists call that hidden architecture the food matrix, and much of ultra-processing is, in plain terms, the deliberate collapse of it. High-shear milling, extrusion and refining take a structure that resists you, and turn it into something soft, dry and instantly available.The result is a food you can eat astonishingly fast. One analysis found the rate of eating climbing steadily from minimally processed to processed to ultra-processed food, from roughly 35 to 54 to nearly 70 calories a minute. Speed matters, because fullness is slow. The gut needs time to release the hormones, GLP-1 and peptide YY among them, that tell the brain to stop. Eat fast enough, and you can pour in a great deal of energy before the signal ever arrives.A food can be engineered not only to taste good, but to disappear before your body notices.THE BLISS POINTThere is a second lever, older and better understood. In the 1970s, the food scientist Howard Moskowitz mapped how pleasure rises with sweetness only up to a point, the "bliss point", beyond which more sugar pleases less. Industrial sensory panels have been titrating to that peak ever since, and to its cousins in salt and fat.Whole foods rarely carry sugar and fat, or fat and salt, in the lush combinations that light up the brain's reward circuits. Engineered foods can be built to sit precisely there.A 2019 study that put numbers to "hyper-palatable" foods, those combining fat, sugar and salt in particular ratios, found that well over half the products in a large database met its criteria. That does not make any single biscuit a drug, and I am wary of the language of addiction. But it establishes something a raid can never register: there are measurable, engineered combinations that make a food unusually easy to keep eating.The most quietly devastating evidence comes from a controlled trial by the American researcher Kevin Hall in 2019. Volunteers lived in a lab and were fed, for a fortnight each, an ultra-processed and a minimally processed diet, matched on the label for calories, sugar, fat, salt and fibre.On the ultra-processed diet, people spontaneously ate about 500 calories more a day, and gained weight. The study was small and short, and its mechanisms are still argued over, so I will not pretend it settles everything. But it unsettles the comfortable belief that food is fully described by the numbers on its back.Something about the structure, the speed, the sheer engineered ease of the thing changed how much people ate, before anyone had decided to.A COUNTRY THAT ALREADY KNOWSNone of this is foreign knowledge that India must import. Our own institutions have already said it.The ICMR-National Institute of Nutrition's 2024 dietary guidelines name ultra-processed and high-fat, sugar and salt foods as drivers of diabetes, hypertension and heart disease, and make one point that ought to be printed above every supermarket door: fortifying unhealthy food does not make it healthy.You cannot sprinkle a vitamin over a problem and call it solved.The scale is not in doubt either. India's retail market for ultra-processed food grew from under a billion dollars in 2006 to tens of billions within little more than a decade, and adult obesity and diabetes climbed alongside it. Our plates were already heavy with refined starch, most of our energy coming from carbohydrates, much of it refined. The engineered snack and the sweetened drink do not replace that plate. They stack on top of it.And the global epidemiology, summarised in a 2024 umbrella review in the BMJ, of nearly 10 million people, links higher ultra-processed intake with a long roster of harms, from heart disease to type 2 diabetes, though honestly these are associations, not verdicts, and I will not dress them up as more.Set against all this, the World Health Organization's advice is almost quaint in its simplicity: keep free sugars under a tenth of your energy, salt under five grams a day, saturated fat modest. A great many perfectly legal products breach those lines in a single serving. That is the paradox at the centre of everything: food can be entirely lawful and still be a poor thing to eat every day.THIRTEEN YEARS FOR A STICKERHere is where the asymmetry becomes almost comic, if it were not so costly.The state can put dozens of inspection teams into sweet shops across 30 districts in a single weekend. It has spent more than a decade unable to agree on the design of a warning label for the front of a packet.The push for front-of-pack labelling has crawled through draft after draft since 2013, and only under pressure from the Supreme Court has it moved at all. The regulator has now proposed red warning marks for foods high in sugar, salt or saturated fat, with the court hearing the matter afresh this September.Even the proposal reveals the timidity. In its first phase, a product would carry a warning only if it crossed the threshold for two of the three nutrients at once. Picture a drink drowning in sugar but light on salt and fat. Under a two-of-three rule, it could slip onto the shelf wearing no warning at all.That is not a scientific subtlety. It is a designed gap, and it exists because a warning label is bad for business in a way that a raid on a small halwai never is.So the milkman who bleaches his chhena is caught within the week. The corporation whose lawful formulation nudges a nation toward diabetes is still negotiating the shape of a sticker.WHAT WE MEAN WHEN WE SAY SAFEI was trained to see food as a system of chemistry and microbiology and structure and texture and stability, and that training is exactly what makes our narrow definition of safety so hard to accept. I know that changing the particle size of a flour, the water in a matrix, the distribution of fat, the speed at which a thing melts on the tongue, changes how much of it a human being will eat. That is not a conspiracy. It is my discipline. And a discipline this powerful deserves a public health imagination to match it.We do not need to demonise processing, or pretend a festival peda is healthy food, or claim that science has proven every packet a poison. We need only widen the question. Let "unsafe" grow to include not just what was illegally added, but what was lawfully engineered to be over-eaten.Let a warning appear when food is high in even one of the three, not two. Let there be ceilings on salt and sugar and saturated fat by category, so that the same brilliant laboratories are made to move the bliss point downward. Let us stop advertising this to children as though it were a toy.We have become extraordinarily good at engineering food to survive warehouses and lorries and the long wait on a shelf. We are only beginning to ask what happens when that same engineering meets the human appetite. The adulterated sweet is a crime because it fails a test written in another century. The engineered snack is a triumph because it passes one. The body, in the end, does not much care which statute the calorie arrived under.Radifah Kabir is a food technologist.- EndsPublished By: Radifah KabirPublished On: Sep 8, 2026 07:30 IST