Every society must solve the same intimate problem: how to eat food prepared by a stranger. For most of history, people rarely had to.
Food arrived through relationships. You knew the family that owned the field and the woman who ground the flour. You knew the local halwai’s hands and his temper, the ghee he swore by and the ghee he actually used, the fly he waved off the jalebi with a practised wrist. Trust was never printed on the food. It surrounded it.
That trust was neither innocent nor equally assigned. Traditional Indian eating codes decided who could cook, who could serve, who could touch a water pot and who could only look at it. These codes policed people more carefully than germs. We became a country that could detect caste in a glass of water, but not lead in noodles.
Yet, underneath the cruelty lay an intuition every culture shares. A chair remains a chair, but food crosses the frontier of the body and becomes us. Anthropologists call this incorporation, and every cuisine is partly a device for managing the dread of eating the wrong thing.
Then the city grew and local food makers vanished. The grocer retreated behind a counter, the counter dissolved into an aisle and the aisle went online to slip into a phone. Into that distance stepped the brand.
Its first achievement was social substitution. Henry Heinz bottled horseradish in clear glass so buyers could see there was no turnip in it. A palm tree on a tin of Dalda persuaded a ghee-proud nation that hydrogenated fat was modern, thrifty and, most audaciously, pure. A round-cheeked girl on the Parle-G wrapper promised the same biscuit across the land.
The logo became the grocer in laminated form. It gave the stranger a reputation it could lose and disappointment an address. The neighbourhood halwai could cheat you and stay in business. A company could at least be embarrassed nationally.
But Heinz’s glass was a window and Dalda’s tin was a wall. At some point, branding stopped showing us the food and started showing us ourselves. Diwali arrived in Cadbury’s purple foil, hostel nights in Maggi’s yellow pack and a nation’s idea of thanda (cold) in a curved bottle that seemed drenched in sweat.
Noodles ceased to be a factory product and became what mothers made late at night for children during exam season. The front of the pack became a theatre of belonging. Details printed on its back became a statutory inconvenience.
The brand’s biggest offering was relief: permission to assume that somebody, somewhere, had checked its quality. We bought it gladly. Vigilance is exhausting.
The bill arrived in instalments. Worms in a purple foil in 2003 made Diwali briefly taste of doubt. Pesticides in colas seemed to give thanda an aftertaste. Then came traces of lead in Maggi in 2015. This monsoon, food-regulation officer Tukaram Mundhe walked into Mumbai’s kitchens with a thermometer and was cheered like a cricketer. He gave the public mood a face.
That mood is a new definition of trust. Back in the day, proximity made us say ‘I know who made this,’ while representation made us say ‘I recognize the name.’ Verification says ‘show me.’ A generation that tracks a taxi from pickup to doorstep finds it absurd that it cannot track paneer from milk to plate.
Old forms survive; the street vada pav man still runs on proximity. But a demand to see is now being made of all of them at once. Companies understand this. They print health warnings on packs in developed markets but lobby against them in India, as though the Indian liver were a hardier organ.
For food businesses, a classic sequence is reversing. Emotion used to create trust and information confirmed it. Now information sets the terms on which emotion may operate. The Amul girl will keep her job, but her story must now survive contact with the kitchen.
The back of the pack will outrank the front. Lot numbers, temperature logs and test reports will gain salience. Concealment acquires a new moral meaning: what once passed for corporate discretion starts to look like guilt. Mystery may enhance a perfume brand, but it diminishes the appeal of paneer.
Transparency will also create its own theatre, complete with consultants and little green ticks. A QR code can lie as elegantly as a commercial and quality audits can become rituals. Society rarely graduates from myth to fact. It develops more demanding myths about what counts as fact.
Verification is costly. Temperature logs and lab reports may be pocket change for a multinational but could ruin a halwai. A regime built to discipline giants may end up squeezing out the small food supplier and, with him, the oldest kind of trust we have. If megacorps have noticed, few admit it.
The brand, then, must learn a humbler trade and become a witness. The strongest food companies will be those that can afford to appear boring and sell dull packages.
The face on the box is being asked to turn around. It may show us what was long kept hidden. The grocer is back. Older now, and suspicious, with a phone in hand. This time, he’ll have read the pack label.
The author is a senior advisory professional.