Hold the Mayo

You could be forgiven for believing that mayonnaise, that gloopy, gelatinous, egg-white lie of a sauce, is simple. But mayonnaise is not just a condiment. It is an emulsion—of oil and water, yes, but also of microbial peril and cultural persuasion, class aspiration and cold chain logistics. In India, it has gone from a European garnish to a street food adhesive. It is in your burger, your wrap, your roll, your momo, sometimes as a creamy surprise, often as a blunt-edged compromise. And now, some Indian states have declared it a public health risk.

The Tamil Nadu Food Safety and Drug Administration Department, no longer content to let the sauce slide, has banned the manufacture, sale, and packaging of mayonnaise made from raw eggs for one year. Cases of salmonella infection linked to improperly stored mayonnaise had surfaced across South India, causing hospitalisations and even death. The death of a woman in Hyderabad after consuming raw egg mayo had prompted a similar ban in Telangana last year. There is, it must be said, something absurdly Shakespearean about perishing at the hands of mayonnaise—a condiment whose own history is a stew of disputed parentage and continental pettiness, now implicated in death by dip.

Mayonnaise is not, contrary to common belief, French in origin. Or rather, it is—and it isn’t. The French claim it with the linguistic entitlement of an empire that made sauces the semantic centre of its civilising mission, insisting that “mayonnaise” comes from the Battle of Mahón in 1756, when French troops seized the Spanish port of the same name during the Seven Years’ War. There, the story goes, Duke Richelieu’s chef, short on cream, whisked together eggs and oil in desperation, thereby inventing the world’s most temperamental emulsion. But the Spaniards, predictably, call foul. They argue the French merely plagiarised “salsa mahonesa” from Menorca—a sauce older than Richelieu’s duels and more stable than French culinary pride. To complicate matters, a third theory insists the name derives from the French word ‘moyeu’, meaning egg yolk, which if true, would make mayonnaise both tautological and slyly self-referential, like a condiment in on the joke.

None of this makes mayonnaise taste better, but it does make its cultural positioning more obvious. Mayonnaise is the edible residue of empire—white, Western, whipped into shape. In the 19th century, it travelled with European colonisers to the Americas and beyond, where it began to insinuate itself into local food grammars. In the U.S., it became first a salad dressing and later, the blue-collar binder in supermarket slaw. In Japan, it was reborn as Kewpie—slightly vinegary, MSG-laced, and squeezed with ecstatic precision onto okonomiyaki and takoyaki. In the Philippines, it became sandwich spread, in Russia, salad glue. Everywhere it went, it both assimilated and imposed itself, doing what white sauces do best: smooth over difference, neutralise texture, and declare themselves indispensable.

India, however, took its time. Until the late 1990s, mayonnaise was still a mostly foreign import, restricted to elite clubs and hotel buffets. It was liberalisation that did it. Alongside microwave popcorn, tetra pack juice, and the sudden, violent ubiquity of oregano sachets, mayonnaise crept into middle-class kitchens through the twin seductions of convenience and global aspiration. But there was a hitch. The Indian market, with its deep vegetarian preferences and chronic suspicion of anything labelled “egg”, demanded a workaround. Enter eggless mayo—an invention that makes culinary purists bristle but has found a robust second life in India’s condiment aisle.

Eggless mayo is to mayonnaise what tofu is to paneer: the texture is similar, the protein profile different, and the cultural politics entirely flipped. Made from milk proteins, starches, emulsifying agents, and industrial magic, it often tastes like a milkshake that got lost on the way to a sandwich. But it sells. It sells because India is, in large part, a society that wants the performance of Western modernity without its digestive demands. It also sells because it lets fast food chains and cloud kitchens satisfy both Hindu vegetarians and halal-conscious Muslims—what in business jargon is called “pan-religious scalability”. No eggs, no issues, no violations. Until, of course, there are.

Because mayonnaise, when made with real eggs, is a microbiological minefield. It is not cooked, and it is barely preserved. Its survival depends on cold chains, clean counters, and acidification—i.e., the addition of vinegar or lemon juice to bring the pH down to a level unfriendly to bacteria. This is not difficult in a HACCP-certified kitchen in Switzerland. It is considerably harder on a humid Chennai street corner where the power cuts out for four hours and the mayo is stored in reused plastic bottles next to a rusting stove. The organism in question is Salmonella enterica, a rod-shaped, gram-negative bacterium with a taste for undercooked poultry and uncooked yolk. It causes typhoid, food poisoning, and, in certain underregulated settings, the kind of intestinal warfare that ends in hospitalisation.

To understand the risk is to understand the remarkable instability of mayonnaise itself. An emulsion—by definition—is a culinary truce: oil and water suspended in an uneasy, temporary alliance, forced together by the diplomat known as lecithin, found abundantly in egg yolk. But egg yolk is also the perfect nursery for pathogens, especially Salmonella enterica. This rod-shaped bacterium thrives in temperatures between 5°C and 60°C—also known as the “danger zone” in food safety manuals. In homemade mayonnaise, which lacks pasteurisation and often adequate refrigeration, Salmonella can multiply to infectious doses in just a few hours. The mechanism is simple and sinister: once ingested, the bacteria survive stomach acid, breach the intestinal lining, and trigger a cascade of inflammatory responses—nausea, fever, diarrhoea, dehydration. In immunocompromised individuals, the infection can escalate into systemic salmonellosis, affecting organs and sometimes resulting in death.

Industrial mayonnaise circumvents this risk with pasteurised egg yolks and pH control. A mayonnaise with a pH below 4.1 is considered inhospitable to Salmonella, but achieving that level of acidity without compromising taste or texture requires exacting formulation—something that makeshift kitchens and street vendors rarely bother to calculate. Add to that India’s summer, irregular refrigeration, and multi-hour storage in open containers, and you’ve created the perfect petri dish. It’s less of a condiment at that point and more of an experiment gone wrong.

Hence, the ban. Tamil Nadu’s food safety department, citing growing health complaints, decided to outlaw raw-egg mayonnaise for one year. It did not, however, ban mayonnaise. This is an important distinction, because while the headlines screamed “Mayonnaise Banned in Tamil Nadu”, what had in fact been outlawed was only one specific, high-risk variant: the artisanal, uncooked, small-batch, whisk-it-yourself version that, ironically, is the most “authentic.” What remains is the industrially pasteurised, stabiliser-filled, shelf-safe version that critics deride as fake but regulators prefer because it won’t kill you.

Yet mayonnaise has fans. Rabid ones. Taste, as the philosopher Carolyn Korsmeyer points out, is never just about flavour. It is about identity, hierarchy, and cultural capital. When you choose mayo over chutney, you are not just choosing creaminess—you are choosing what kind of consumer you want to be. Mayonnaise, in the end, is less a taste than a texture of aspiration—smooth, silent, and suspiciously white. In banning the raw, we haven’t just regulated risk; we have clarified what kind of modernity we are willing to swallow.

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