Chemical-free food, and other bedtime stories for grown-ups

We have praised Tukaram Mundhe enough and more. Let us now praise the finest artists working in India today, for they have been shamefully overlooked. Their art does not hang in galleries, but at eye level in the supermarket, in gentle greens and honest browns, and their masterpiece is a single word printed exactly where your eye will land before it reaches the price. That word is ‘natural’, and I have come to believe it is the most accomplished short story ever written in this country, because in seven modest letters, it tells you an entire comforting fiction and asks for nothing in return but your trust and your money.

I have stood inside the room where these small miracles are composed, where the recipe is argued into being and the packet is dressed for its debut. And I have come, with a full and faintly treacherous heart, to sing the praises of my own trade, because what we have learnt to do to a label is nothing short of sorcery, and sorcery this graceful should not go uncelebrated.

The old adulterator, the poor blunt fellow being hunted through the sweet shops this festival season, was an amateur. He stirred starch into chhena and cheap oil into ghee, and lied clumsily about what he had put in. How very last century. The new artist does not stoop to changing the food at all. He changes only the sentence you read about it, and that, I promise you, is the higher craft.

Consider, first, the pure and weightless beauty of the word natural, which owes its genius entirely to the fact that almost nowhere is it required to mean anything at all. It floats free of definition, and because it can be pinned to nothing, it can be promised to everything, which is precisely the quality one wants in a lover or a politician.

Arsenic is natural. So is the mould that quietly poisons a badly stored nut, and the venom coiled in a snake, but let us not be pedants at a celebration. Simple. Natural. Wholesome. Just food, right? Turn it over, and the story gets considerably longer, and considerably more chemical. (Photo: Vashu Sharma/India Today)

I confess a certain sorrow, then, that the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India has spent 2026 playing the philistine, chasing down the honey that is mostly syrup and the edible oils with their swollen promises, and ruling, sternly, that a sugary drink pretending to be juice must now confess itself a fruit drink when the actual fruit runs thin.

The Supreme Court, no friend of the arts either, keeps pressing for a blunt red warning on the front of the packet. One despairs. They are treating a delicate and profitable illusion as though it were a lie, when any artist could tell them it is merely an interpretation.THE MIRACLE PERFORMED WITH CELERY

But the finest work in the collection, the piece I would walk across the city to admire, is the one performed upon your breakfast bacon, and it deserves to be understood in full before it is applauded.

For a century, we have cured meats with sodium nitrite, the quiet guardian that fixes the rosy colour, deepens the savour, and, far more importantly, holds off Clostridium botulinum, the organism behind botulism, which is one of the most efficient ways a piece of meat has ever found to kill you. On the label, this guardian appears as a preservative, or as the chilly little code E250, and the modern shopper crosses herself and flees, not entirely without reason, since under high heat, nitrite can help form nitrosamines, a family of compounds of which several are carcinogenic. A humble stick of celery, tagged "naturally preserved," casting the unmistakable shadow of sodium nitrite. The vegetable did nothing wrong. The label did all the work. (Photo: Vashu Sharma/India Today)

So the artist, faced with a villain the customer will not forgive, performed a small act of transubstantiation. He reached for celery. Celery, like beetroot and spinach, is rich in nitrate by nature, and if you ferment a concentrated celery powder with the right obliging bacteria, that nitrate is reborn as nitrite, the very same curing agent, arriving at the identical destination by a scenic route. The meat is cured by nitrite, exactly as before. Nothing of substance has changed. And yet the label may now murmur, with the regulator's own blessing, that no nitrites have been added, save those naturally occurring in celery powder, and the front of the pack may wear the holy words the whole aisle longs for, uncured and natural.

It is, I hope you agree, magnificent. The nitrite in your bloodstream is too uneducated to know it was once a vegetable, and cannot read the front of the pack in any case. There is little evidence the meat is a whisper healthier, and some that its nitrite now arrives in more erratic amounts than the tidy synthetic dose it replaced. No matter. The fear was answered, the word was delivered, and the molecule stayed for dinner, having merely been baptised on the way in.advertisementTHE RESURRECTION OF MONOSODIUM GLUTAMATEIf celery is the collection's quiet masterpiece, the treatment of MSG is its grand theatrical resurrection, and I never tire of watching it staged.

Monosodium glutamate is the sodium salt of glutamic acid, the compound that lays down the deep, round savouriness we call umami, and it has been feared for half a century on the strength of one letter to a journal and almost no evidence since. The dreary, well-documented truth is that the American food regulator considers it safe and has never once managed to confirm that it does the things generations have blamed it for. We exiled an innocent, in other words, on a rumour, and the artist saw his opening. No added MSG smiles bravely from the front of the pack while its old friends slip in through the ingredients list wearing masks. Same flavour, better alibi. (Photo: Vashu Sharma/India Today)

To observe the resurrection, that same regulator states, with unusual bluntness, that a food may not honestly cry no added MSG if it contains ingredients that are themselves fountains of free glutamate, ingredients answering to the softer names of yeast extract, autolysed yeast, hydrolysed vegetable protein, and soy protein isolate.

Turn over almost any packet that boasts its freedom from MSG and there they sit in the small print, often arm in arm with disodium inosinate and guanylate, the discreet companions whose only purpose is to make glutamate taste even louder. It is the identical molecule, performing the identical work upon your tongue, brought back from banishment in a whiter robe and a costlier one. We paid a premium to be rescued from a ghost, and the ghost catered the party.AN ODE TO CHEMICAL-FREE

And then there is my beloved, the phrase I would frame above my desk if it would not break my professional heart, the sublime and perfect emptiness of chemical-free.

It is the purest poetry on the shelf precisely because it refers to nothing that has ever existed. Water is a chemical, and if you announced dihydrogen monoxide, the scientific name for water, at a wedding you could clear the hall. Salt is a chemical. The apple in the fruit bowl is a dense and humming laboratory of things, carrying its own faint natural formaldehyde without the slightest guilt.

A food genuinely free of chemicals would be a food free of matter, an empty and honest packet at last. To promise "chemical-free" is therefore to promise the void, beautifully, and to be thanked for it. No added MSG gives a cheerful thumbs up at the front door while MSG slips in through the back, disguised as yeast extract and hydrolysed vegetable protein. Nobody checked the ingredients on the way in. (Photo: Vashu Sharma/India Today)

The lesser hymns are charming in their own right. Natural flavour and artificial flavour are so often the very same molecule, one coaxed patiently from a plant and one built briskly in a vat, that your tongue could not referee the difference and your bloodstream does not try.

A proud "no added sugar" frequently means the sweetness was merely ushered in wearing the fancy dress of date paste or fruit-juice concentrate. Sea salt, rock salt and the fashionable pink one, all hand your heart the identical sodium.

Every one of these is true in the narrow legal sense and false in every sense that governs a human life, which is, when you think about it, the exact and demanding definition of a very good lie.THE CONGREGATION THAT LONGS TO BE FOOLED

None of this artistry would sell a single packet, of course, without a congregation that comes willingly to be enchanted, and here I must praise us, the faithful, most of all.

We arrive already carrying the fear the artist needs, the instinct scientists politely call chemophobia, by which we trust the word we can pronounce and dread the one we cannot, never noticing that dosage and not spelling is what decides whether a thing will hurt us. The shopper has closed her eyes to enjoy the label properly. Somewhere behind her, a food inspector is reading the fine print, but he was not invited to this moment of grace. (Photo: Vashu Sharma/India Today)

Beneath it lies the oldest and most flattering superstition in any kitchen, the belief that natural is another word for safe, a faith that nature is a gentle mother rather than what she actually is, an indifferent chemist with no stake whatever in your survival.

And over all of it drifts what the studies call the health halo, the documented magic by which a single virtuous word on the front of a pack persuades us the whole thing is kinder, so that we eat more of it and sleep better for having done so. India's own dietary guidelines say the quiet part plainly, that dressing an unhealthy food in fortification or flattery does not make it healthy, and still the biscuit that is drowning in sugar goes on selling briskly under the banner of its missing preservatives. We are not so much deceived as courted, and we say yes with our eyes open.THE CONFESSION

I could go on praising them, and they would deserve it, for they are genuine artists, and I am, against my better judgement, a fan. But I am also a food technologist, and somewhere between the celery and the yeast, the performance stopped being able to charm me, and I should end honestly, since honesty is the one ingredient the whole shelf is short of.

Let me be fair, because I love this discipline too much to leave it a cartoon. Real reformulation exists and it is a genuine good, and when a company truly lowers the salt or the sugar or removes a fat we have sound reason to fear, that is not a trick but a kindness, and I will defend it against anyone.

The much-slandered E-number, that E followed by a code, like E211 or E250, which simply means an additive the food safety authorities have assessed and approved, is very often the most tested, most precisely measured, and most trustworthy thing in the entire formula. A humble preservative is frequently the only guard standing between a family and the invisible microbes that turn a quiet supper into a night in a hospital corridor.

What I cannot applaud is opacity wearing the costume of virtue. I cannot applaud the trade of a known and measured additive for a vaguer natural cousin that smuggles the same chemistry past you along with its own uninvited companions, the stray pesticide, the trace of heavy metal, the allergen the short label never mentions. I cannot applaud the sleight of hand that fixes your gaze on a harmless long word so that you never look at the sugar, the salt, the fat, the engineered ease with which the thing slides down.

And I cannot forgive what all of it quietly does to trust, because every time a shopper learns that natural means nothing and that no added MSG was only a wink, a little of their faith in every honest label on every honest shelf dies with it, and that kind of loss does not wash out.

The old adulterator corrupted the food on your plate, and we jailed them for it. The new one corrupts only your understanding of it, and we hand them an award and carry their product home. One lies about the dinner. The other lies to you, and leaves you grateful.

So keep your celery and keep your yeast. I do not want them banned. I want the label made to tell the truth it is currently permitted to dodge, so that nothing may call itself free of a thing it is chemically full of, so that glutamate is named as glutamate whichever soft door it enters by, and so that the front of the packet is finally forced to tell me what the food is loudly high in, and not merely what it is meaninglessly without.

Give me the long, ugly, honest name. I can live with the chemistry. It is only the poetry I can no longer swallow.- EndsPublished By: Radifah KabirPublished On: Sep 11, 2026 07:51 IST