Food labels. Most ignore them. What a tragedy—because they reveal so much. Yet careful consumers are wondering: what if the information labels hide is more important than what they show?
Labels tell you chocolate has real cocoa, but not if that cocoa grew in soil loaded with cadmium. Labels say 20gm protein in your supplement based on the Kjeldahl test—which only measures nitrogen. Add certain cheap fillers to inflate nitrogen readings, and 5gm protein magically becomes 20gm on the label. And was the data independently verified? Who knows. Some small brands simply copy-paste nutrition facts from competitors.
This information asymmetry is a source of power for food manufacturers. That's why we need a strong regulator.
But our regulator isn't keeping up. Whether due to lack of resources, outdated testing methods, or industry capture, they're not delivering the oversight consumers expect.
In this vacuum, a new trend has emerged: citizen accountability via lab tests. Anyone with a few thousand rupees can get stuff tested. When a product stands "exposed," it feels like revolt—a small guy winning against the big guy, with verifiable data. (Vive la resistance, via chemistry!)
This is great; if institutions don't keep industry in check, citizens should. But this movement has a blindspot—a lab report with some numbers isn't automatically a source of truth: equipment calibration errors occur often, detection limits mean compounds go unnoticed and... you can send identical samples to different labs and get entirely different results.
This complicates our problem: are we saying is the entire foundation of our food safety infrastructure built on a broken testing system? Will every new reveal just lead to a nihilistic sense that nothing can be trusted?
No. Cynicism doesn't help, so take a step back. Look at what's happening: we don't trust regulators because we believe they're captured by industry, so we seek third-party testing. We don't trust food brands because, well, we know the lies we've been fed, so we demand third-party testing. But these third-party testing facilities also operate in the same environment. Why would they be different?
That's the problem: India is a low-trust society. The flaws we see aren't just isolated brands going rogue; they're predictable outcomes of a system where accountability itself has been hollowed out, rules are applied inconsistently and trusting feels irrational.
So any long-term solution that doesn't account for the social, economic, and political reasons leading to erosion of institutional trust will fail.
History has taught us—from Arab Spring to the ongoing crisis in liberal democracies—that exposing broken systems happens much faster than building trustworthy alternatives. Old order falls in months; credible institution building takes decades.
That’s the commitment needed to make a lasting change. And that’s why I am so proud of what we are building at The Whole Truth Foods.