A rather strange bit of news caught my eye earlier this week—straight out of Nagpur, where local health authorities proposed that our beloved street foods, samosas and jalebis included, should carry cigarette-style health warnings. Yes, warnings. On samosas. For those of us who find deep comfort in flaky pastry and hot oil—especially during the monsoon—this felt like a personal attack. The logic, apparently, is rooted in public health: the rise of obesity and lifestyle-related diseases needs to be addressed. Fair enough. But suggesting that a freshly fried samosa poses the same threat as a cigarette? That’s a stretch.
The announcement sent snack lovers (including yours truly) into a bit of a tizzy. Because let’s be honest—what’s a rainy afternoon without a samosa in one hand and a jalebi in the other? In fact, in my last column, I had declared my undying love for this snack that travelled all the way from Central Asia to India and was eventually adopted as our own. The original samosa, closer in form to a meat dumpling, is believed to have originated in 7th-century Kazakhstan before being adapted in Persia and Turkey. When it arrived on Indian shores, the meat filling didn’t quite suit the local palate. So, Indian resourcefulness did what it always does—it reimagined the dish as a potato-stuffed, spice-laced icon, now found everywhere from office canteens to wedding buffets, in countless regional variations.
Curious to see if this indignation was just mine, I checked in with a few fellow Delhi-wallahs. “This is absurd! Has the government thought of doing it with the packets of ultra-processed foods?” asked Chitra Raghuvanshi, a resident of Anand Vihar. She made a solid point—there’s an entire supermarket aisle dedicated to barely-foods that don’t come with a whiff of warning.
Veteran food columnist Vir Sanghvi also weighed in on X (formerly Twitter), calling the proposal an agenda that unfairly targets “poor people who struggle to make an honest living selling pakoras, vada pavs and samosas.” He rightly pointed out that if health authorities were truly concerned about public well-being, their first stop should be the giant multinational corporations churning out ultra-processed snacks wrapped in shiny packaging and brimming with harmful.
I couldn’t agree more. There’s something deeply off about targeting handmade, homegrown food that’s been part of our cultural identity for centuries, while letting factory-made, lab-assembled products continue unchecked. Yes, we absolutely need to talk about health. We need to be more conscious of what we eat and how often we eat it. But there’s a vast difference between awareness and overreach. The samosa isn’t the villain here—it’s what we’ve allowed our larger food systems to become.
Somewhere along the way, the narrative around food quietly shifted. The real threats—rows of ultra-processed breakfast cereals with more sugar than dessert, instant noodles with suspiciously long shelf lives, and carbonated drinks marketed as lifestyle choices—these are the products that are quietly shaping modern diets. Yet, they rarely bear the burden of public scrutiny in the way a humble roadside samosa does.
Think about it. That samosa is often hand-made from scratch by local vendors using real, recognizable ingredients—flour, potatoes, spices. There are no preservatives you can’t pronounce, no stabilisers whose function you need to Google. It’s prepared fresh, consumed hot, and eaten with the kind of cultural intimacy that can’t be bottled. Now contrast that with a packet of flavoured chips. The ingredient list reads like a chemistry exam. And yet, those packets aren’t slapped with cigarette-style warnings. Instead, they’re marketed as fun, modern, even “baked and healthy,” with just enough green on the label to imply virtue.
Somewhere along the way, the narrative around food quietly shifted. The real threats—rows of ultra-processed breakfast cereals with more sugar than dessert, instant noodles with suspiciously long shelf lives, and carbonated drinks marketed as lifestyle choices—these are the products that are quietly shaping modern diets. Yet, they rarely bear the burden of public scrutiny in the way a humble roadside samosa does.
Think about it. That samosa is often hand-made from scratch by local vendors using real, recognizable ingredients—flour, potatoes, spices. There are no preservatives you can’t pronounce, no stabilisers whose function you need to Google. It’s prepared fresh, consumed hot, and eaten with the kind of cultural intimacy that can’t be bottled. Now contrast that with a packet of flavoured chips. The ingredient list reads like a chemistry exam. And yet, those packets aren’t slapped with cigarette-style warnings. Instead, they’re marketed as fun, modern, even “baked and healthy,” with just enough green on the label to imply virtue.
So yes, let’s talk about balance. Let’s talk about nutritional literacy. But let’s also be fair in where we point the finger. Because the real danger isn’t in that hot, golden triangle passed around with chai—it’s in what we’ve allowed to quietly take its place.
As for me, I’m not putting a warning label on my snack. In fact, I’ll take two, thank you very much. Monsoon waits for no one, and neither does a good samosa.