The Economic Survey of India, released recently, has begun treating nutrition and food systems as economic infrastructure rather than just a public health side note. One of its quieter but most consequential observations is the rapid expansion of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) in Indian consumption patterns.

The Survey links this shift in food consumption patterns to rising obesity, diabetes and non-communicable diseases — a warning that dietary transitions are unfolding faster than our understanding and any subsequent policy imagination. India is being reorganised by the industrial food environment and is eating differently.

When millions of people are making the “wrong" food choices at the same time, the problem is not addressed by the adjectives used for someone with the disease and personalised fixes. It is how the country’s food ecosystem is structured.

Food choices and their impact on one’s health are often framed as a story of personal failure. People lack discipline. Families have abandoned traditional diets. Children are glued to screens and junk food. Reports across various platforms in the recent past across India have pointed out that close to 40 per cent of the population in some cities like Indore suffer from high cholesterol in the age group of 18-30. Other reports cite that 40 per cent of Indians are at risk of liver disease linked to obesity.

Therefore, when obesity is observed across income groups, regions and generations, individual explanations of obesity collapse; people have obesity, they are not obese. Millions of people do not suddenly lose willpower in synchrony. They are responding to a system designed around them.

The Indian food environment today is engineered for convenience, not by design or choice, but by constraints that define an individual’s life. Ultra-processed foods are produced industrially; they are cheaper per calorie, aggressively marketed, hyper-palatable and easily accessible from urban metros to small-town kirana shelves. They have a longer shelf life and are produced for profit maximisation. Packaged food, even though unhealthy, is an adaptation to time scarcity and other constraints around which many double-income households design their lives in dense cities across the country. Time saved in a society with long working hours, brutal commutes and shrinking domestic schedules is an attempt to address individual fatigue and well-being.

Fresh produce in a city is volatile in cost........

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