Lighter idli, or gateway food?

I've been thinking about McCain foods again, particularly their efforts at entering, or creating, the frozen food market in India. Stephanie Nolan's May 22 article in the Globe features McCain's new frozen idli caught my attention recently. (Idli are a popular breakfast dumpling made from fermented and ground lentils and rice.) The article talks about how McCain has struggled to convince Indians to buy frozen food, because people think food that's not made and eaten fresh is also not healthy or tasty. Sounds like a wise food philosophy to me, but from McCain's perspective, this is not good for business. So, they are not just trying to promote their products—they are trying to shift the way people think about frozen, preserved, or "old" food entirely.

The Indian population creates a conundrum here. While people generally don't like to eat food that has been prepared in advance or, in many cases, outside the home, urban lifestyles are changing in ways that create a real demand for convenience. According to the Globe article:

Rapid social changes in India – a huge growth in people living in nuclear rather than extended families; more households with two adults working; less comfort with live-in domestic help; plus more aspirational desire for packaged and processed foods – make this a market with huge potential. Consumer analysts say it is now about 300 million people strong.

The interviews I conducted in India for my dissertation support this. People told me that household and social changes were creating a huge demand for convenience food, and that was making it difficult for people to cook from scratch and eat as they traditionally had done. Many important traditions around what and how people eat were being threatened in the process.

McCain sells western style frozen foods (like french fries and potato patties) and frozen versions of Indian foods. One of their recent products is frozen idli, and they undertook a major promotion campaign to get people to try them. Apparently, the frozen idli are catching on with some people. McCain attributes this to the fact that they developed specialized grinding equipment for their factories that mimics the traditional stone grinder, creating a better texture than people get at home using electric grinders.

To me, industrial idli production is an interesting technological innovation, but I think it should be viewed with caution. First, it still doesn't make a perfect idli—the article says that many people don't like them unless they are soaked in sambar, the soupy curry normally served with idli. Second, while the product may be good for McCain's sales figures, it doesn't begin to address the problem that people no longer have time to cook food. This could be the start of a very slippery slope toward western style diets. Idli and sambar are Indian dishes, but the frozen, microwavable instant meal is very much a western habit—a habit that also includes pizza pops, neon breakfast cereals, spray-on pancake batter, and all manner of substances manufactured to resemble food. Once the idea of pre-made food becomes acceptable, people start to get used to the "not quite like grandma used to make" taste, and the whole system of industrial food starts to become normalized.

Do I think it's a good thing that McCain has found a way to make their frozen idli more palatable? In a way, yes. If I was going to eat an instant meal, I would at least want it to be as good as possible. Is it that simple? No.

Maybe the answer is to find ways to structure social life—whether in India or the West—so that people actually have time to cook and eat together. Maybe there could be local idli shops like we in the West have (or had, depending on where you live) neighbourhood bakeries. Maybe there is a way to improve electric grinders so people can make decent idli at home without spending hours hunched over a set of grinding stones. I don't know. What I do know is that allowing ourselves to become completely disconnected from growing and buying and preparing and cooking the food we eat has not improved health, happiness, or how we support one another in community.

So please, dear India, don't get sucked in by a light, fluffy dumpling. It could be a gateway to things in your pantries you might not even recognize as food.

How did real become revolutionary?

Photo: www.mccain.ca

I've been reading some recent news on McCain Foods and came across a (sponsored) Globe and Mail article called McCain's "real ingredients" revolution pays off. Basically, McCain has started to use only actual food ingredients in many of their frozen food products. As the article puts it: "As part of the It’s All Good initiative, Florenceville, New Brunswick HQed McCain has reformulated the recipes for over 70 of its pizza, pockets and potato SKUs to include only recognizable ingredients." Don't ask me what they put in there before, but you can read all about the current plan here.

On balance, I think this is a very good thing. Never mind that the driving force behind an initiative like this is undoubtedly marketing, I'm happy to see that a major brand has committed to using actual food ingredients in their products. One my consistent issues with the food industry is the almost unavoidable array of highly processed "food" products that are manufactured from apparently edible constituents into something resembling food. They come with long ingredient lists consisting of modified and reconstituted substances, chemical additives, conditioners, artificial colours, flavour enhancers, preservatives, and occasionally some actual food. I've often thought the labels should include a statement along the lines of:

"Product may or may not contain actual food."

Maybe it could go right next to the allergy warning that the product was "manufactured in a facility that processes nuts and may contain traces of nuts." Market-driven or not, eaters are much better off with products that contain actual food rather than the results of some chemistry lab experiment.

It's not all good, though. McCain and other companies (not yet enlightened about the value of eating actual food) still wield immense power in the food system. For people without the time, facilities, desire, knowledge, or ability to cook for themselves, the giant food manufacturers get to decide what they can eat. People can only choose from what is made available to them. For farmers who grow the food that ends up in these products, the manufacturers set the terms and conditions under which they must grow and sell their produce, and those terms usually favour the companies.

It's great to see the food industry responding to demands for healthier and more natural products. But it is also important to remember that buying manufactured food products is not the same as cooking from scratch. It's easy to get caught up in celebrating the small victories and forget the state of affairs in which the food system finds itself. That state of affairs, in my opinion, can be summed up by the fact that McCain's switch to using only actual food in their food products can be considered "revolutionary." How did we get to a place where food stopped containing food?