Has Your Child Ever Eaten A Real Biscuit?

by Shauravi Malik and Meghana Narayan

Huffington Post India

Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar? That’s us being funny, but also asking a really basic question that vexes us. How did a simple preparation of real butter, sugar and flour get to a place where the core ingredients have morphed into something often unrecognizable at the back of a packet?

How did a simple preparation of real butter, sugar and flour get to a place where the core ingredients have morphed into something often unrecognizable at the back of a packet?

Cookies as the Americans call it or biscuits as the British call it, have been part of our snacking culture in India for a very long time. The humble shortbread biscuit, core to tea and coffee times for adults and snacks for children has local variations by geography. Most Indians will recognize at least one of these variants – nankhatais, Shrewsbury or khara biscuits.

Somewhere between trying to maintain a magically low price point while creating cookies that taste and look attractive, nutrition has been cut from the equation. We seem to have collectively landed in a place where the shelves are laden with cookies made of refined flour, refined sugar or invert syrup, palm oil or dalda (more elegantly called hydrogenated vegetable oil), soy lecithin and an astonishing array of legally permitted emulsifiers (E-numbers), preservatives, synthetic colours and additives. As buyers and parents, we are equally to blame for not voting with our wallets.

It’s actually really easy to put a real cookie back in the jar — just make it at home!

Fourth, invert syrup is used for baked goods because of its ability to increase shelf life. It is a mixture of glucose and fructose — basically, it is an added refined sugar (which is typically added in addition to refined sugar in most cookies!). This makes it harder to work out what the actual percentage of sugar is in the ingredients. There is increasing consensus in research which highlights the importance of limiting sugar consumption.

Fifth, refined flours like maida which results in the loss of valuable nutrients and fibre. In some instances, this is then corrected with “added vitamins and minerals”.

Lastly — our favourite bugbear. There are some ingredients that we cannot even pronounce. And they feel like they belong in the chemistry lab, and not in my child’s food.

It’s actually really easy to put a real cookie back in the jar — just make it at home! Turns out that new research supports what your grandmother said, a bit of butter in moderation is good for you. You’ll discover that most children love to bake, especially if the result is things that they like. You can make cookies once a week, and keep them in an air-tight container and ration them out for the rest of the week. Be good and don’t eat them all on the first day!