Feature Article

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Eating at home isn't the in thing anymore. Hanging out is hip, especially in the mushrooming fast food joints that blister the skylines of India's cities. The urban middle classes with money to burn are redefining nouvelle cuisine. The costs are huge but few are counting the calories fewer still checking the nutrition chart.

Eating habits, cooking habits, cuisines have changed, are changing, across the country, across social strata, across the rural-urban divide. And for anybody’s money, it isn’t a change to inspire confidence in the future of public health.

The food processing industry is growing faster than it and pharmaceuticals.One of the implications of this growth is that industry is buying raw materials on a large scale affecting both supply of food, which is contracting, and prices, which are rising.

The price-nutrition dynamic plays out differentially in the developed and developing worlds. In the former, as a number of studies have noted, fast food constitutes a much greater proportion of the diet of the poor.

Data compiled by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) show that in 2004, though production of most cereals decreased as compared to 1990, exports increased. Similarly, the production of pulses and groundnut decreased but exports increased. In both cases, domestic consumption too decreased. In the case of wheat, however, all three indicators showed a rise.

Earlier, most people ate what was locally available: fish, for example, was a staple in coastal areas, and people living in, or close to, fertile agricultural tracts preferred grains. Classical cuisines are often a good indicator of local food preferences, even if we account for the caveat that these were very often on the plates of the well-to-do. Food was sourced locally.