Rude Food by Vir Sanghvi: Slipping through our fingers

In fact, the orthodoxy has changed somewhat in the last few years. Butter and ghee are not necessarily bad for you and oils like coconut oil. which are high in saturated fats have actually become trendy and are being touted as miracle foods.

No matter which fat or oil you use, saturated or unsaturated, there is however one factor we hardly ever consider: How pure and uncontaminated is it?

It is not enough to check whether it is unsaturated, you should also examine its provenance and the way in which it is extracted. If it is subjected to innumerable industrial processes before it is bottled, then you are consuming an Ultra Processed Food and harming your health, while imagining that you are doing your heart a favour.

Back in 2012, when the packaged food industry was spending crores promoting imported olive oil, I wrote a piece about the various scams that olive oil was associated with. At that time, a book called Extra Virginity by Tom Mueller, a New Yorker writer who lived in Italy, had just come out. Mueller loved olive oil but was concerned that it had become the subject of many fraudulent and criminal practices.

For a start, there was the extra virgin oil scam. Extra virgin olive oil is a great product and you should use it whenever you can. But it is hard to find. Much of the oil labelled as extra virgin oil is actually cheaper, inferior oil that is falsely branded. Mueller reckoned that 98% of the olive oil sold in Italy was not top-grade oil, despite the misleading packaging . Much of it was dodgy stuff imported from other countries, sometimes mixed with cheaper oil (such as rapeseed) and then mislabelled.

Italians used to consume, a decade ago when Mueller wrote his book, six lakh tonnes of olive oil. Italy exported another four lakh tonnes. This sounded great, but the problem was that the total production of olive oil in Italy was just three lakh tonnes. So a lot of bogus oil, mostly from other countries, was being passed off as Italian olive oil.

While extra virgin oil was preferred by consumers, oil that did not claim to be ‘Extra Virgin’ was disgusting, often chemically extracted from the stones of the olive. Because the scam was so widespread, Mueller wrote, one way of checking whether the oil you were buying was the real thing was to look at prices. A decade ago, a bottle of good Italian extra virgin olive oil cost six euros to produce. This was more than double of what a cheap, industrially extracted oil would cost. But, in the market, there was only a small differential between oil labelled as ordinary olive oil and so-called extra virgin. This was because the ‘extra virgin’ sold at the lower prices was bogus.

My article created a furore back then. The big food companies were pushing olive oil in India and were not pleased. Some local dodgy characters were selling their own olive oil businesses to multinationals and protested. Even the then Italian ambassador who was, sadly enough, one of the more foolish envoys Rome has had in India, wrote a letter of protest to my management.

I was reminded of that article while talking to Kapil Batra, my old TV producer, who has always been a small farmer and is now making a range of high-quality edible oils called JaiPure. I have tried the JaiPure organic oils and they are very good, but Kapil has been surprised by what an uphill struggle it is to sell good-quality oil in India.

Some of it has to do with the straightforward cheating that has always characterised the business. If you take your own mustard seeds to an oil press and ask them to make oil for you (as Kapil used to), you may well be handed an inferior, cheap oil and be told that it is the oil that was extracted from your seeds.

And some of it is just consumer ignorance. When you buy a bottle of say, sunflower oil, you assume that all the oil in there is sunflower oil. Actually, it often isn’t. Until recently, manufacturers could massively dilute the sunflower oil with cheaper oil and still legally sell it as sunflower oil. Now they are obliged to list the ingredients on the bottle, but the labelling can still be misleading.

Almost all of the oil you buy from the big manufacturers will have been subjected to industrial processes in factories. All of it is heavily processed and most of it is an Ultra Processed Food.

That’s not just my view. That’s the position of the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) which has classified cooking oils as UPFs, and advised against consuming too much of them because of possible damage to health.

In the case of many foods, that would get alarm bells ringing but Indians still don’t think of edible oils as being factory-made foods. We still believe that as long as we are consuming unsaturated oils, we are fine. Actually, we are not.

The alternative to industrial cooking oils it is to go organic. Ideally, these should be oils made from seeds that are grown without chemical fertilisers and pesticides, in farms that are shielded from the chemicals added to the soil by neighbouring farmers. Because yields are low in pesticide-free agriculture and because the proportion of viable land is lower, organic seeds are much higher in price.

Then there is the oil extraction process itself. Kapil and other organic oil makers like him take organic seeds and cold press them to extract their oil. Cold pressing is a traditional method, the key to which is squeezing the oil gently out of the seeds. If you extract the oil roughly, you increase the friction and therefore the heat. Oils extracted at high temperature change character and lose many of their beneficial compounds.

To be fair to the government of India, there are checks that monitor the processing of organic oils, so anyone deviating from the right processes should be penalised. And yet, it is an open secret in the industry that cold-processed organic oil is frequently mixed with oils from non-organic seeds that have not been cold-processed.

It is not dissimilar to the experience of Italian olive oil. Once again, governmental checks don’t always work, so one way of checking on the authenticity of the oil is to look at price. A good organic cold-processed olive oil should cost double of what normal oil costs. If it is much cheaper, then chances are that corners have been cut.

In many ways, Kapil’s experiences withJaiPure are like the experiences of artisanal Italian oil producers who continue to make the best oil they can. But they know that their products will be undercut in the market by cheaper, less authentic oils.

The advantage the Italian artisanal producers have is that good olive oil now has snob value, almost like expensive wine, and there are more and more people who can appreciate the real thing. In India however, we treat edible oil as a staple and are happy to compromise on quality if the prices are lower.

It is a foolish economy. The people who risk their health with cheaper UPFs and bogus organic oils will happily spend thousands on eating out while saving a few hundred rupees on oil. In the process, they damage their own well-being and the health of their children.

But no matter how many government health warnings there are, nothing will change till we start treating edible oil, a product we consume nearly every day, with the respect it deserves.

From HT Brunch, June 15, 2024

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