Indians love street food to no end. The scores of street food stalls in every city are proof to that. Not just the number of stalls, but the variety of foods sold by the vendors cater to palates of all kinds in the country. Be it the spicy tangy golgappas or the scrumptious, crispy bread pakodas. And not to forget, the delicious varieties of chaats, Indians take their street food very seriously. And perhaps this love and obsession is the reason why we most often ignore the most basic requirement that any food vendor must have – hygiene. While all the street food that we indulge in or love so much is undoubtedly yummy, but more often we turn blind eye to the environment it is made in. The way the street food is cooked, served and stored is a matter of concern and seems like the reactions on a viral Instagram Reel has bought it to limelight.
In a recently uploaded video, content creator Virat Raghav, on his Instagram handle @gareebpanda, showcases the famous Barule Chaat- a beloved street food from parts of UP like Aligarh and Agra. The chaat is a flavourful mélange of potatoes, spices and herbs. The potatoes are marinated in a specific way, wherein they are first fried in oil and kept aside, cut into smaller chunks, and re-fried for the extra crunch. It is finally seasoned with dried spices like chaat masala and drizzled with green chutney right before serving. Take a look at the video here:
While the chaat do look irresistibly delicious, the preparation hasn’t gone down well with the netizens. The video has garnered over 4 million views, 150k likes, and hundreds of comments. While many comments said how they knew the popularity of the chaat and how delicious it indeed is, the majority of the comments pointed out how unhygienic the method is, in particular how the oil, in which the potatoes were being fried, looked. The oil was dark in colour and had foam forming on it. From cringe to hatred, the quality of oil used for frying this chaat received all kinds of negative comments.
"Look at the oil” remarked one of the users while another wrote “Oil is extremely unhealthy and is too used to be used again." Another comment read “How people are not scared of eating street foods now a days??". More comments ranged from "Look at oil .... Not healthy I guess he is using that oil from past 100 years.... Whatever support good people so they can improve the quality of food" to "Oil enough for a heart attack".
There were some positive comments as well that were only about how popular and tasty the dish is. "Aligarh me famous h" (This is famous in Aligarh), "Mazedaar" (Looks great), "I tried this barule this is so tasty" and "Looks too tempting", wrote several users.
What are our thoughts on this dish? Will you try this ever? Let us know.