Despite Maggi, Ready to Eat is Awesome!

Ok, Maggi’s been caught with its pants down. With reports of excess lead content and reports of other contaminants, it’ll be a while before my favorite pre-packaged Indian fast food snack recovers. I never even used to cook it – just eat it raw directly from the packet! Let’s hope Nestle gets its shit together to ensure that this won’t happen again.

But quite a few people are using this opportunity to take the stand against ready to eat as a whole. Crowing in an “I told you so” manner, it’s become just another bashing point against the “evil western influence” that emphasizes fast food, and how “traditional Indian cooking” has always been so pure blah blah.

Look, I’m not defending Maggi here. There are safety standards that every product must comply with – ready to eat or not. Maggi needs to adhere to those, or get sued in court. But to use this incident as a crusade against ready to eat food in general, and against “western culture” as a whole is beyond dumb.

I love ready to eat food. I’ve been eating it regularly for the past 7 years. Stick it in the microwave, and done! The same goes for meals like corn flakes. I don’t even mix the flakes with milk cause I dislike having to wash the vessels afterwards. I eat it right out of the box. No cooking, no fuss.

I detest cooking. More than that, I detest having to wash up the dishes afterwards. And because of that, I am thankful to brands like Maggi who give me the opportunity to satisfy my hunger without having to step into a kitchen. Just because we find out that certain companies and products haven’t been adhering to food safety products doesn’t imply that ready-to-eat in general is bad.

The elimination of cooking is, according to me, one of the highest achievements of mankind. Whether or not “regular” home cooked meals are any better tasting is up for debate. I personally don’t think so, and a few double blind experiments show that people can’t really tell the difference.

And is home cooking guaranteed to be safer? Unless you pick your own herbs, gather your own salt, and grow your own vegetables, there is no way you can have 100% quality assurance about what you make in your kitchen. The idea that you have complete quality control over what you prepare in-house is an illusion. You are as much at risk as anyone else.

In a way, this business with Maggi is a great thing. It will ensure that other manufacturers relook at their own processes and buck up. It’s a warning that we – the customers – are keeping an eye on things and will hold these brands accountable for what they sell us. It’s one step along the way towards a safer ready-to-eat market.

In the end, these products are here to stay for a reason. Convenience is extremely important to a lot of us. And when it saves me from purchasing separate ingredients, preparing them, mixing them, cooking, grinding, and WASHING, I’m completely sold. Sign me up. All hail fast food!

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7 thoughts on “Despite Maggi, Ready to Eat is Awesome!”

  1. good stuff

    the only real problem with ready-to-eat cooking is that it’s not good enough yet, so you can’t necessarily live on it. but that’s a solvable problem, and eating ready-to-eat doesn’t make you worse at cooking, or anything

    i actually have this ready-to-eat indian food product which i’ve enjoyed for a while, sold at traders joes. it comes in a plastic container whose weird shape defies description (sort of like a bag…a really sturdy, rigid one), and does need to be poured into a bowl to be eaten, but regardless i still love it :D

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  2. Don’t really agree with you, even though I too hate cooking, but I can feel myself ballooning if I eat ready to eat foods (which all taste the same after a while)! I’d rather eat salads if I really don’t want to cook; but otherwise, I at least know which spice and oil I am adding to what I cook! No, I definitely am not so extremely health conscious as to actually grow my veggies and spices and also raise chickens in my backyard!! :D

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    • In reply to Roshni

      Then that’s a great untapped market – ready to eat foods which don’t make you fat. In fact, I know that there are lots of them that already exist. Perhaps in a while, the market will churn out something more to your taste…

      My point is, this isn’t a diss against ready to eat foods as such, but only against existing ready to eat products. If the set of products appear, would you have a problem eating it?

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  3. I am a big lover of fast food myself. When I was in the US, I would always get surprised when pretentious snobs would turn their noses up at fast food and TV dinners. I wonder if they have ever eaten at MacD. It’s tastier and cheaper than anything they can make at home or at a fancy restaurant.

    That said, the madness over Maggi cuts both ways. While some traditionalists in India have used it to bash “ready to eat” Western stuff, some in the West have gone to the other extreme in bashing India: here’s the Washington Post:

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/06/03/maggi-indias-favorite-instant-noodles-is-facing-a-ban-the-middle-class-is-calling-it-betrayal/

    “Some analysts say it could be because the brand came to symbolize a middle-class defiance against hours of laborious Indian cooking traditions, as well as a modern woman’s freedom.”

    Hear that? The reason the government went after Maggi is because they wanted to reduce freedoms for women.

    Just like there are some in India who have a crazy mistrust of the West, there are just as many in the West with a crazy mistrust of the brown natives. It’s a draw. So don’t worry. Relax.

    And don’t even get me started on nuts in the West who are bat shit crazy about bashing GM food.

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    • In reply to Sumit

      In the linked article (if I’m reading it correctly), people seem to be angry with Maggi for having betrayed them after becoming a part of families for years – not the government for banning it…

      And I personally love McDonald’s – specially the french fries! Long live fast food – it’s pretty much set me free.

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