Originally posted on health.spectator.co.uk.
Food takes a lot of time: to prepare it, cook it, to wash the dishes afterwards. Ever since we started jumping on mammoths and digging stuff up from the ground, food has been a faff.
A British company called Huel claims to have solved all that. It takes everything you need from food, mostly derived from peas, oats, seeds, and various other plant sources, and turns it into a kind of soulless dust. You mix that dust with water to create a grim drinkable gloop.
Huel was set up less than three years ago but is already the default food replacement used by students and those in Britain’s growing technology sector. (Its biggest rival is the US firm Soylent.)
The gloop is nutritionally balanced so, if you want to, you can withdraw from one of the oldest human conventions: mealtimes. I decided to go hardcore Huel for a week to see what would happen.
I hit my first major hurdle on day one, meal one, when I realised that I had a breakfast interview. I quickly revised the rules so that every meal I did not have with another person would be a Huel meal.