That's One Smart Cookie
A look at how India advertises its food
Reported and produced by Meenakshi Ramamurthy
Every day, I get a phone call from my mother asking me to regurgitate, in word form, everything I've most recently eaten. For many years, I chalked this up to overprotective parenting. Until one day, out of curiosity, I asked my college roommates if their parents required such detail. The first quickly answered, "No." But what surprised me was that my other roommate chimed in with a resounding, "Yes." What we shared went beyond phone calls and straight to our roots — we're both Indian, and what I have come to realize is that these kinds of prying dietary questions are actually quite common among us. Simply put, Indians are concerned about nutrition.
Now everyone wants to be healthy and tries to eat right, but there are certain signs that Indians are little more obsessive about their food, and there's evidence for it in India's commercials.
India may have a booming economy, but its commercials are something out of 1950s America. They're straightforward, with catchy jingles, and they focus on the concrete health benefits of their food products.
Deep Family Values
Marion Arathoon is an advertising editor for LiveMint, an Indian news source in collaboration with The Hindustan Times and The Wall Street Journal. She says that this kind of advertising is a part of India's ad tradition, and that it's common to see "frames of mom dishing out tasty and nutritious food to family and children." She thinks it's a reflection of India's culture, one based on "deep family values." Hearing this, I decided the best way to get to the heart of the matter was through its stomach.
I arrived at the cafeteria of New York's Ganesh temple, where I found Samarth Rao munching on a crispy dosai. Samarth is a college student and a second-generation Indian. After talking to him for a few minutes, he confirmed those deep Indian family values Marion had talked about, but in a way you might not expect. He confessed that "while pigging out at Taco Bell," he had his mom's face in the back of his head saying "No, Samarth, don't eat this." His family values ran so deep that they manifested themselves into a guilty conscience.
Your Child, Plus Good Nutrition, Equals Success
Apparently he's not the only one who feels the pressure. Vikas Bajaj says Indian parents feel guilty about what their kids eat, too. Bajaj is a business reporter for the New York Times and author of the article "In India, the Golden Age of Television is Now." He says commercials that center on nutrition work because they play off Indians' anxieties about their children's success. Bajaj adds that these food products become a "veiled promise" for parents that their child will turn out "brilliant" and become a "successful doctor or engineer."
For Indian advertisers, this "promise" becomes an equation: your child, plus good nutrition, equals success. And nowhere is that more blatant than in ads for Parle-G biscuits. Tagline: G equals Genius.
Competition in the Indian school system is intense. And if good nutrition helps guarantee parents a better future for their kids, then they're often willing to go the extra mile for it. In one ad, mothers race bicycles after their city's "whiz kids" to find the secret to their success. After cornering the kids, and even hypnotizing them, the mothers learn the kids' secret weapon: Horlicks, a nutritional drink similar to Boost.
For better or for worse, advertising editor Arathoon doesn't think change in Indian food advertising norms is likely any time soon. She argues that the average Indian is "discriminating" and wants to choose the "best from the East and the best from the West."
And since my mom still calls me every day, waiting to hear what I've most recently digested, I'd say that in this case, I'd have to agree.