Food In A Different Format: The Antidote To An Appetite For Junk.
In 1998, the journalist Eric Schlosser, wrote an article for Rolling Stone titled “Fast-Food Nation Part One: The True Cost of America’s Diet About Junk Food.” The story was an indictment of American culture; what Schlosser saw as an epidemic of lazy gluttony weakening the heart of post cold-war USA.
Schlosser told the story of his visit to operational units of the North American Aerospace Defines Command, the United States Space Command and the Air Force Space Command, located deep within Cheyenne Mountain, which sits on the eastern slope of Colorado’s front range, rising steeply from the prairie and overlooking the city of Colorado Springs.
Fifteen hundred people then worked inside the mountain every day, maintaining the facility and collecting information from a worldwide network of radars, spy satellites, ground-based sensors, airplanes and blimps. The Operations Centre tracked every man-made object that entered North American air-space or that orbited the earth. It provided early warning of missile attacks. It detected the firing of a long-range missile, anywhere in the world, before that missile had left the launch pad. Much of the work performed at the centre was top-secret. The hallways of its inner sanctum were painted slate grey, the ceilings were low and there were combination locks on every door. The complex was built to be self-sustaining for one month. Its generators could produce enough electricity to power a medium-size city. Its underground reservoirs held 6 million gallons of water; workers sometimes traversed them in rowboats. Inside the mountain there was a fitness centre, a chapel, a hospital, a dentist’s office, a barbershop and a cafeteria. When men and women stationed at Cheyenne Mountain were tired of the food in the cafeteria, they often sent somebody over to the Burger King at Fort Carson, a nearby Army base. Or they’d call the Domino’s on South Academy Boulevard in Colorado Springs.
Almost every night of the week, a Domino’s deliveryman wound his way up the lonely Cheyenne Mountain Road, past the stern No Trespassing signs, past the security checkpoint at the entrance to the base, driving all the way up to the fortified North Portal, tucked behind chain-link and barbed wire. At the spot where the road headed into the mountainside, the deliveryman would drop off his pizzas and collects his tip. And should Armageddon have come, Schlosser suggested, should a foreign enemy someday have showered the United States with nuclear warheads, laying waste to the continent, entombed within Cheyenne Mountain, along with the high tech marvels, the pale-blue uniforms, comic books and Bibles, future archaeologists may have found other clues to the nature of our civilisation — Big King wrappers, hardened crusts of Cheesy Bread, Barbecue Wing bones, and the red, white and blue of a Domino’s pizza box.
During the last four decades, fast food has infiltrated every nook and cranny of American society. An industry that began with a handful of modest hot dog and hamburger stands in Southern California has spread to every corner of the nation, selling a broad range of foods wherever paying customers may be found. Fast food is now served not only at restaurants and drive-thrus but also at stadiums, airports, college campuses and elementary schools; on cruise ships, trains and airplanes, at Kmarts, Wal-Marts, gas stations and even hospital cafeterias.
The year before Schlosser wrote his article, Americans spent more than $100 billion on fast food. Today that figure is closer to $120 billion. Americans now spend more money on fast food than they do on higher education, personal computers, software or new cars. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos and recorded music combined.
Schlosser conclusion was that hundreds of millions of people buy fast food every day without giving it much thought, unaware of the subtle and not so subtle ramifications of their purchases. They rarely consider where this food came from, how it was made, what it is doing to the community around them. They just grab their tray off the counter, find a table, take a seat, unwrap the paper, and dig in.
The Tipping Point?
Eighteen years after Schlosser visited Cheyenne Mountain, I visit the offices of a UK energy and technology company, where I used to work as a marketing consultant. I’m there to meet a friend for lunch. It’s 12-noon and the fast food vans arrive — the burger and chips man, the sandwich woman and the pasty woman. Queues form quickly as people pile out of the offices to grab lunch. Right on cue a Domino’s pizza scooter arrives with a three-box delivery. Inside the foyer of the building the vending machines are hard at work dispensing crisps, chocolate bars and soft drinks. “There’s a canteen a mile down the road,” my friend says. “It serves really nice healthy lunches, but people can’t be bothered. They have a 15 minute window of opportunity, so it’s the vans or the vending machines or dial-a-pizza. There are three other takeaway services that visit the offices and they come and go all day.”
In defence of the UK energy and technology company, they have encouraged their workforce to eat healthier. “We had a visit from a nutritionist,” my friend said, “and the company provided a fruit bowl every Wednesday, although they also brought in boxes of doughnuts and pastries every Friday. In the office people are finding it hard to give up on junk food and switch to healthy food.”
I told my friend about Schlosser’s vision of a post apocalyptic Cheyenne Mountain, littered with Big King wrappers, hardened crusts of Cheesy Bread, Barbecue Wing bones, and the red, white and blue of a Domino’s pizza box. “Two hundred people work here,” she said, glancing back at the offices of the UK energy and technology company. “At the end of any given working day, the bins are full of the wrappers and remnants of junk food. We are like a modern day Cheyenne Mountain.”
According to a recent survey commissioned by Voucher Codes.co.uk UK consumers spend £29.4 billion on takeaways every year. The average person now makes their way through 84 fast food meals over the course of a year and packs in a further 64 ready meals, totting up a bill of £1,304 over 12 months. According to the study, laziness is a major contributor when it comes to our fast food desire. One in four people (25%) cite laziness as the main reason for their takeaway habit and a further 13 per cent claim they simply do not have time to cook from scratch.
Food in a different format
With the bringing in of the New Year, the resolution of millions of people worldwide will be to lose weight, as always. The desire to eat more healthy foods and ditch the junk is a popular one but also one of the most broken New Year’s resolutions. From over-priced health foods and cheaper unhealthy options to lack of time to prepare healthy meals and a plain old sweet tooth winning out over good intentions; the reasons behind failing to change the way we eat for the better are plentiful and varied.
The good news is that the research shows that the less junk food you eat, the less you crave it. My own experiences have mirrored this. Since Christmas I have embarked on a personal dietary experiment. Around midday, Monday through Friday, I have taken three scoops of Huel — a ‘nutritionally-complete food product’ engineered and manufactured in the UK for people with no time to prepare well-rounded meals, but with the desire to eat healthily. Huel provides the right mix of proteins, healthy fats, oils, vitamins and minerals in a convenient powdered form — just add water.
As I’ve slowly begun to eat healthier, I’ve noticed myself wanting sandwiches, pizza, crisps and chocolate less and less. Some people refer to this transition period as “gene reprogramming.” Whatever you want to call it, the lesson is the same: if you can find ways to gradually eat healthier, you’ll start to experience the cravings of junk food less and less.
With the ever changing, fast pace of our everyday lives, people are looking for a quick and easy way to eat healthily, which doesn’t cost the earth. Huel could be the answer to this problem with its forward thinking formula, which guarantees optimum nutrient and vitamin intake, with less calories and costing less money per week that a junk food fuelled lifestyle.
A new way to think about food
The last couple of years have seen a huge uprising in meal replacement and shake diets promising weight loss alongside an array of other benefits. However, these types of diets only offer a quick fix by reducing calorie intake drastically and are often lacking in many essential vitamins and mineral that the body needs in order to function at its best. Meal replacements or supplement diets can be seriously dangerous to your body as suddenly cutting your calorie intake you risk losing muscle mass and putting your body under unnecessary strain.
Huel is not a meal replacement programme nor is it a supplement diet programme either. As a progressive brand, with a growing ‘community’ of passionate and open minded consumers, Huel are dedicated to changing the way we think about food and creating a much more sustainable food production process. “With obesity levels rising to epidemic levels and modern food production methods producing much more food than we need, and with 30% of all food simply being thrown away in the UK alone, we realised that something needed to change,” said renowned nutrition expert and founder of Huel, James Collier.
“Huel is challenging the way we view food in order to offer a healthy and inexpensive alternative to the unhealthy diets that many people put their bodies through. By attempting to change the way we both produce and eat food, Huel is looking to create a more sustainable and a much healthier future for those that want to grab it.”
Huel is a complete powdered food, which contains at least 100% of the daily-recommended amounts of 26 essential vitamins and mineral as well as all of the proteins, carbs and fats that your body needs every day. It is also low in sugar and 100% vegan yet contains enough protein, carbohydrates, fats and essential vitamins and minerals in order to keep you full throughout the day. Again, Huel is not a meal replacement but rather a full meal in the form of a powder that you make into a delicious drink. And with the price of Huel working out at as little as £1.45 per meal, it truly is cheaper than junk food so there is now no excuse not to treat your body to a healthy and balanced diet.
It only takes about six weeks of healthy eating to ditch your dependency on junk food, especially salt. Many people swear by the Paleo diet, which encourages eating the way we were naturally intended to, with lots of grains, veggies, fruits and meat, and far less processed stuff. Similar whole-food approaches, such as 100 Days of Real Food, are also very effective and will get you on track to cleaner eating.
However, most of us don’t have time to make food from scratch. First, there are about a zillion healthy recipes out there, and many of them are relatively easy to make. In fact, I’ve found during my own trials that the healthiest meals tend to involve fewer ingredients and a shorter prep time. Plus, people who go to the effort of making their meals tend to have healthier habits over time.
Food hacking
For me, Huel is a catalyst and a control mechanism. Getting into the Huel habit, if only at lunchtime five days a week, is de-junking my life, giving me more energy and, psychologically, I feel much better about myself. I’m not suggesting all of my future meals be in liquid form — cooking and eating conventional food is something I enjoy, particularly in a social context– but the implications of so called “food hacking” is truly life-changing.
And if said powder is 100% vegan (better for the environment and animals) super convenient, high in protein (150g per 2000 calories) and fibre (33g), low GI, contains less than a teaspoon of sugar per 2000 calories, contains no allergens (apart from non gluten-free oats), requires minimal packaging and has a shelf-life of 12 months (so zero food waste), why wouldn’t it be a standard item in every kitchen cupboard — especially office kitchen cupboards.
Going back to Schlosser’s vision of a post apocalyptic Cheyenne Mountain, littered with junk food wrappers and the lunchtime scenario at the offices of the UK energy and technology company — the fast food vans, pizza delivery and vending machines — one can’t help but wondering how much more productive the workplace could be in people ditched the junk. Energy levels would certainly be higher and, after a while, as people started to see and feel the benefit, the mood would also lift. We should all open our minds and our mouths to a new menu.
To find out more about Huel visit www.huel.com
