I was still in school when a new chhole bhature shop popped up in the neighbourhood, selling at Rs 5 a plate before it rose to Rs 7. Back then, eating out was reserved for birthday or wedding anniversary celebrations. This chhole bhature stall constituted my first real joy of eating out on an ordinary day. My mother would warn: Eat homemade food. Outside, they use artificial colours, leftover vegetables from the market, oil reused again and again, and no one practices any hygiene.
As eating out became a part of my job, a pattern became clear — barring a very few, mostly high-end places that proudly give journalists a tour of their kitchen, most restaurants would dissuade me from entering theirs, or ask me to wait ten minutes while they made a quick dash to fix everything before I saw it. I have watched dirty brown water being wiped off the floor just as our photographer entered the kitchen to take a shot.
The last few months have reminded me of my mother’s warnings as the drive led by Maharashtra FDA commissioner Tukaram Mundhe inundated the FDA’s long silent official WhatsApp group with photos and videos, often proving her right.
In less than three months, Mundhe has become something of a hero in the popular imagination. His drive against milk adulteration is reaching every part of Maharashtra, to the point where dairy farmers and milk collection centres even in remote villages are now scared to add even water to their supply. His push to implement the Food Safety and Standards (Safe Food and Balanced Diets for Children in School) Regulations, 2020 across Maharashtra’s schools is particularly ambitious, and laudable.
But blunt “heroism” has its own casualties, and this is where the current drive starts to throw up problems.
The Instagram reels pointing you to a new restaurant or a “hidden gem” often obscure the reality: This rapidly growing industry does not exist in a vacuum. It depends on a chain of stakeholders far beyond the restaurateur and the chef. Owners are asking, mostly in hushed tones because they fear being next: How are rats their responsibility, especially if their premises are on the ground floor in South Bombay and other low-lying areas? A dead rat that lies unattended for hours or days, or missing rat traps despite a clear infestation are their responsibility. But how are they meant to stop the giant rats that can dig through nearly anything to get in?
Then there’s hygiene more broadly. They must keep their own premises clean, but who is responsible for the disputed plot next door that the whole neighbourhood has turned into a garbage dump, or for keeping flies at bay in a city where it rains for four to five months of the year, and which sees at least one or two flood-like situations annually? Restaurants in Bombay’s heritage districts are paying enormous rents per square foot, carrying overheads to match. They are wondering whose job it is to keep the shared drainage chambers and gutters pest-free in the first place — the municipal corporation, the landlord, or those who have leased one unit in a much older building some months ago?
They are also asking if getting penalised on Tuesday for a product with best before the date of the Monday is fair. A scientist-turned-chef shared how often an expiration or best-before date is slapped on a product because it’s needed for an FSSAI license, but does a packet of red chilli powder really expire after 12 months, or a block of cheese in three months or a bottle of oil or ghee after a year, if stored well?
The deeper issue sits upstream of any single restaurant: Proper shelf-life testing is expensive, and needs to be repeated periodically for every SKU a brand makes. A giant FMCG company can absorb that cost. A small chakki mill, a home-run masala brand, a farsan seller packing chivda in plain plastic, a small dairy — the backbone of how most Indians actually shop for food — cannot. The dates on their packaging are often guesses dressed up as science, because the alternative is not making the product at all.
It is far easier to walk into a business with a checklist and find it non-compliant than it is for that business to be 100 per cent compliant. So why is the FSSAI licensing process itself not doing more of this work before a shop ever opens its shutters? Right now, licenses get issued with comparatively little scrutiny, and enforcement shows up later as a raid. It would cost the system far less, and spare a lot of livelihoods, to build friction in earlier, temporary or conditional licenses tied to specific fixes, a warning with a fixed window to correct a problem before it escalates to suspension.
Meanwhile, the budget eateries have to stay “budget” to survive. Costs have to be held down no matter what — even through inflation, a thali or a combo meal can only stretch so far. Many used to buy vegetables in bulk to save money; now, wary of a drumstick or a carrot going bad and drawing an inspector’s eye, they buy fresh every single day.
None of this excuses cooking in unhygienic conditions or serving substandard food. But it does raise a real question: Does a single fly on a wall, or two carrots that don’t look edible (mould or fungus, we don’t yet know, pending the report) warrant a suspension? A suspension is warranted when there’s imminent danger to public health. But did every establishment that had its licence suspended actually pose that kind of threat? And aren’t we naming and shaming before a lab test even confirms how severe the alleged threat really is?
It’s worth asking, too, why some fully legal, fully licensed food fools us far less than it gets away with. Analogue paneer has become this drive’s most photogenic villain, and it must be labelled honestly. But it exists for the same reason compound chocolate exists: Cheaper substitute fats and emulsifiers standing in for the real thing, sold to a country where very few people can actually afford the genuine thing. Compound chocolate carries FSSAI approval and sits on every shelf in the country, in products most of us eat without a second thought, precisely because we have never asked what “compound” stands for.
We know the numbers: How many F&B establishments got notices, how many licences were suspended or flagged for improvement, how many litres of milk were destroyed. What we don’t know is anything about the lab tests behind these actions. Have they been completed? How many confirmed adulterations? How many paneer samples tested came back analogue? And of all of this, how many actually posed a threat to public health?
My mother was right to warn me all those years ago, and Mundhe is right to be doing what he’s doing. Not only are food operators now taking action themselves and becoming more compliant, consumers too are becoming more vigilant. But a drive this necessary deserves better calibration — the discipline to tell a civic failure from a kitchen’s failure, and a genuine health hazard from a fly that landed on the wrong wall at the wrong time. Otherwise we risk building a system that punishes visibility rather than actual harm, and leaves the real, harder problems of this city’s food chain exactly where they were.
The writer is assistant editor, The Indian Express. heena.khandelwal@expressindia.com
It is far easier to walk into a business with a checklist and find it non-compliant than it is for that business to be 100 per cent compliant. So why is the FSSAI licensing process itself not doing more of this work before a shop ever opens its shutters? 
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