Julian Hearn is the co-founder of Huel, a drink engineered from pea protein and brown rice that is designed to replace the meals of those too busy (or too lazy) to eat in any other way. Not all businessmen practise what they preach, but as he appears in Bee Wilson’s new panorama of 21st-century food culture, Hearn seems really to be living his own anhedonic dream. By her telling, his mission in life, beyond making money out of his strange new brand, is to encourage the rest of us to see that we vastly overrate the sensory pleasures involved in food. Talk of the virtues of the cucumber can, for instance, drive him swiftly to exasperation, for while you and I might picture such a thing dressed in oil and served with tomatoes and feta, he considers it nothing more than a long, green waste of hothouse space. In his eyes, a cucumber is “basically water and only three percent nutrients” and what on earth is the point of that?
The name Huel, an amalgam of “human” and “fuel”, is intended to convey the product’s technological efficiency. But alas, it makes me think of gruel and thus of poor Oliver Twist, hungry and shivering in the workhouse. In other words, it couldn’t sound more joyless if it tried. Joylessness is one of the prime engines of Wilson’s new book, which sets out to examine all the ways in which, in a world of seeming abundance and choice, our food is becoming degraded to the point where it makes us ill – and to unpick our current strategies for coping with this toxic environment. Ultra-processed foods, full of additives and associated, according to some studies, with a rise in cancer risk, are the opposite of joyful. So, too, are the global brands that invade and ultimately destroy local food cultures (Wilson’s book includes an account of the resources deployed by Frito-Lay to promote Doritos in Thailand). But such things have already been widely written about. Wilson, a food writer whose appetite for research seems to know no bounds, is much better when she is on more surprising territory, ground that remains invisible to most of us and, by being so, is all the harder to navigate, let alone evade.
The new global diet has certainly narrowed what people eat. But this hasn’t to do only with fried chicken. Our world contains some 7,000 edible crops, yet 95% of what we eat comes from just 30 of them. Bananas, once such a treat, are not only ubiquitous now; nearly all those we eat are Cavendish bananas, a bland and dry-textured strain that was developed because it transports well and is resistant to disease. Once, you could expect to go to the Czech Republic and gorge on rye bread, a sourdough flavoured deliciously with caraway seeds. But no longer. In Prague today, the shops are just as full of industrially produced wheaten loaves as anywhere else. These things are cultural losses, of course. However, they come with other, more serious repercussions. Bland foods are less satisfying, while cheap, mass-produced ones more likely to be wasted. Food banks now exist even in Germany, the richest country in Europe. But alongside such food poverty, with all its consequences for people’s health, runs a decadence that is, to me, just as grim: Wilson quotes a Deliveroo courier who describes being asked to deliver a “single Nutella crepe” to someone’s desk in the City of London; his customers, he says, often receive their food without uttering a single word.
This silence, an almost mechanical impassivity I’ve observed in certain of my neighbours when they open their doors to young men and women on bicycles, speaks to Wilson’s other main theme, which has to do with the loss of mealtimes and all their attendant rituals. Whether we’re shopping or eating, food is less social than before: self-service tills; delivery apps; mealtimes scattered about; everyone staring at a screen. This matters deeply both in terms of happiness (which should be obvious) and health (which may be less so). In 1969, a study of 4,000 Japanese men over 30 who were living in California found they were more likely to have heart attacks than their counterparts in Japan even when they ate a traditional Japanese diet (the average Japanese man was then much less prone to heart disease than the average middle-aged American man). The men’s health was influenced, researchers found, by such factors as how much they socialised with other Japanese people, by how they organised their lives and thus their eating rituals.
All this is fascinating. Nevertheless, part of me can’t help but wonder what Wilson’s book is for. For one thing, she has relatively few answers when it comes to effecting change. Governments must act, she says, as they have done in, say, in Chile, where in 2016 Tony the Frosties Tiger was killed off (cartoon characters were banned on food products). But in the meantime, why not make more of a ceremony of dinner by using Granny’s china, with its smaller plates? Hmm. A much bigger problem, though, is that books like this preach only to the converted. Nobody who disagrees with the essence of what she has to say is likely to pick it up – and even those who are on her side, as I broadly am, cannot read her in isolation. The din coming from elsewhere is simply too loud. Wilson, as I do, believes eggs are good food, but in the same week that I read The Way We Eat Now, the newspapers were full of stories suggesting they must once again be removed from the shopping baskets of the health conscious. Wise as she is, she only has her finger on the dam.
No wonder, then, that reading Julia Child: The Last Interview and Other Conversations felt strangely liberating. This peculiar little book, comprising six interviews with the cook who taught Americans how to make French food (and who was played by Meryl Streep in the film Julie & Julia), is hardly a must-read. I think most of us know by now that Child’s devotion to the art of making boeuf bourguignon and blanquette de veau was second to none.
Nevertheless, it’s oddly reassuring to be transported briefly back to a time when there was so much less anxiety involved in eating. Child’s voice is brisk, passionate and greedy. For her, cream was cream and beef was beef – and what person in their right mind would have wanted to eat Jell-O salad with grapes and marshmallows when it was possible to have artichokes with hollandaise sauce instead?
• The Way We Eat Now by Bee Wilson is published by 4th Estate (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
• Julia Child: The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Julia Child is published by Melville House (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
