Caution: Contents May Be Delicious

An advisory issued by the Ministry of Health, recommending that schools and workplaces display “oil and sugar boards” listing foods high in saturated fats, added sugars, and salt—including samosa, jalebi, vada pav, laddoo, chips, burgers, chocolates, and cake—has set off more than a public health ripple. It has unsettled the standing of snacks that, until now, had never required justification, marking a shift in tone from celebration to suspicion. Newsrooms leapt to interpret. Samosa to carry a warning label? one headline asked, straining the frame. Jalebi under scrutiny, read another. That samosa and jalebi appeared in the same breath as packaged junk felt less like nutritional parity than a cultural demotion.

The Health Ministry was quick to respond. The advisory was aimed at nudging people towards healthier choices, not condemning cultural or low-cost ones. The Ministry clarified that Indian street food had not been singled out. The examples cited were illustrative, not accusatory, meant to represent a spectrum of high-fat, high-sugar items, not a cultural target list.

That a snack could cause such a stir says less about nutrition than about inheritance. A samosa is not just fried dough with a spiced centre. A jalebi is not just syrup held in spirals. These are foods that have, over time, fermented into the cultural substrate. They belong to railway platforms and school tiffin breaks, boardroom meetings and weddings, Friday hunger and Sunday parties. They are not just eaten—they are known.

The samosa’s lineage stretches back to the sambusak of medieval West Asia. By the 13th century, it had reached the Delhi Sultanate, where Ibn Battuta observed triangular pastries stuffed with minced meat, nuts, and spices, served hot in the kitchens of Muhammad bin Tughlaq. The jalebi’s history runs through the fragrant kitchens of Persia and the Maghreb. Known as zulabiya, it appears in Arabic cookbooks like Fadalat al-Khiwan, laced with rosewater and handed out during Ramadan. By the 17th century, a coiled syrup-drenched sweet—kundalika, possibly the jalebi’s cousin—appears in the Bhojanakutūhala, a Sanskrit dietary text.

The samosa abandoned meat in many regions and embraced potato—an ingredient, ironically, brought in by Portuguese colonisers. The jalebi thickened into concentric orange rings, bulkier than its Persian ancestor, sweeter and less perfumed. It was a public food—handed out on the street, packed into newspaper, eaten standing amidst street corner chaos. It became breakfast, dessert, offering and bribe. In time, ‘jalebi’ became a metaphor for crookedness, and ‘garam samosa’ for gossip still warm.

So when these foods appear on a list alongside soft drinks and chocolate bars, it jars. Not because they are nutritionally innocent but because they are culturally embedded. Because they carry memory, migration and unregulated pleasure. It is true that they fail the test of modern dietetics. A standard 100g samosa contains around 360 kilocalories and up to 28g of fat. Jalebis, depending on preparation, range from 150 to 200 kilocalories each, with saturated and trans fats that hover above recommended thresholds. The World Health Organization’s 2023 nutrient profile model for South-East Asia suggests that foods with more than 10g of saturated fat or 10g of added sugar per 100g should carry marketing restrictions for children. The samosa and jalebi easily fail that test.

But so do many items not on the list. Branded health bars, packaged milk drinks with added sugar, “high-fibre” cereals containing over 20g sugar per 100g. They are marketed with sleek fonts and claims of energy, immunity, or brain development. They are aspirational, English-speaking foods. The samosa is not. The jalebi is loud, sticky, fluorescent, defiantly vernacular.

In cinema, these snacks rarely need explanation. In 3 Idiots (2009), samosas punctuate the days of hostel life, their presence signalling camaraderie and ritual. In Queen (2013), Kangana Ranaut’s tour of Amsterdam pauses for a samosa, a tiny anchor of home. The jalebi appears in English Vinglish (2012), where Sridevi’s character Shashi brings out hot coils of syrup-drenched sweetness, offering them to relatives with quiet assurance. These foods arrive onscreen as shorthand for something older: belonging, comfort and everyday flavour.

The government is right to be concerned, of course. Obesity in India is rising. NFHS-5 data confirms that 24% of adults are overweight or obese. Childhood obesity rose from 2.1% in 2016 to 3.4% in 2021. The World Obesity Federation projects 440 million overweight Indians by 2045. Trans fats—particularly in unregulated oils—pose real threats. The advisory’s intent, to reduce non-communicable disease burden, is not misplaced. But public health is also public narrative. It matters what foods are named. Why the samosa and not the bakery biscuit laced with palm oil and sodium? Why the street and not the supermarket?

The backlash to the advisory was not just about appetite. It was about asymmetry. The state had drawn a circle around what the poor eat. And that is often how taste is reclassified. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has written about how modern cuisines prize refinement, restraint, and discretion—qualities that signal social status and order. This mirrors how street foods like samosa and jalebi, oily, spontaneous and communal, sit uneasily in a culinary regime that now rewards measured portions and sanitised presentation. These foods defy polite packaging. They do not behave. And this, too, may be their crime.

But of late, even these are not immune to health-washing. The food tech market has been rebranding them, tidying the oil, tightening the corners, and selling them back with the sheen of innovation. Over the past few years, a wave of startups has moved into the territory once claimed by the thela and the corner mithai shop. Cloud kitchens offer “hygienic” chaat curated for apartment complexes. Direct-to-consumer brands package air-fried samosas in matte-black boxes with protein counts on the side. Platforms like Zomato and Swiggy now list artisanal kachoris and low-oil vada pavs under “guilt-free” categories. Venture capital flows where the market signals an upgrade: the old heat of the kadai is replaced by smart branding.

This is not just culinary reinvention, it is a kind of sanitised recolonisation. What once lived in the open air, priced by hand and eaten on foot, is being recoded for modernity. As long as there are two Indias, however, one will continue to throng the street for the familiar bloom of heat and crunch, and the other will chase these outlaws of chai time hunger in guiltless half-alive versions. Rehabilitated in parallel markets, Indian snacks will live on, speaking the grammar of packaging, portion control, and polite indulgence, even as the other India tears into a vada pav on the move, hunger met in a fistful of spice and salt.

 

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