液体午餐成为现实？

液体午餐成为现实？

我们经常在科幻电影看到未来人的食物是药丸或者液体，近来在年轻工薪族里流行的冲泡型代餐制品证明这并不是异想天开。

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

obsolete废弃的；老式的['ɒbsəliːt]

sawdust|adj. 撒木屑的['sɔːdʌst]

chug down喝

faff小题大作；忙乱[fæf]

sordid肮脏的；卑鄙的['sɔːdɪd]

regimen养生法；生活规则['redʒɪmən]

gastronomy烹饪法，美食法；享乐主义[gæ'strɒnəmɪ]

Liquid lunches — with pea protein（806 words）

By Jonathan Margolis

Of all the cartoonish future predictions — flying cars, humanoid robots — surely the silliest is that food will become obsolete because it will be replaced by pills.

I have a 1950 edition of Popular Mechanics magazine featuring a preview of life in 2000. “Cooking as an art is only a memory in the minds of old people,” it says, adding that sawdust and wood pulp will, by the 21st century, be converted into food.

In the age of Whole Foods Market, celebrity chefs and artisan edibles in every store, this seems wide of the mark. Yet the curiously old-fashioned food pill — or potion — notion is finally starting to catch on, especially among young men working in the technology sector.

There has been coverage of Soylent, the Californian nutrition drink conceived by techies for techies too busy to eat. There are now almost 100 rival, mostly liquid, products globally, aimed at the same demographic. They are compared and contrasted on a Slovakian website, Blendrunner.

Most are based in the US, Holland, Poland and the UK. But many of the great foodie cultures now have one or more start-ups claiming to produce nutritionally complete lunches, which can be chugged down by a young coder in 30 seconds. Companies in France, Italy, Spain, Australia and India are in on the trend. Even China has one, called Ruffood.

A 35-year-old tech entrepreneur told me he finds lunch “too much of a faff”, and has taken to consuming two liquid meals a day made by Huel, a UK start-up.

“Otherwise lunch would be a Tesco ham sandwich, crisps, a Coke and a Mars,” he says, “which isn't very healthy, plus I find it a bit sordid eating at my desk.”

Huel, he points out, comes as a powder, is pleasant to drink and is cheaper at little more than £1 a meal. “I do it in a NutriBullet with a double espresso and ice. It tastes like digestive biscuits and keeps me really energised until supper.”

He has bumped into other Huel-users, he said, in pubs and on the street, recognisable by their Huel T-shirts — yes, they have those.

The only thing is, this particular young guy has been weird about eating since he started on solids. I happen to know this, because I am his father and have less than fond memories of getting him to eat anything beyond Smarties.

And while a few odd young men may comprise a gap in the market, I wonder if there is a market in the gap.

But Huel, it turns out, based in Aylesbury, in south-east England, and producing in Devon, in the south-west, has sold more than 5m meals in 55 countries in less than two years.

Its customers are mostly educated men aged 24 to 35. The product is versioned like software: Huel 1.2, 1.3 and so on.

The product is a blend of vegan protein made from brown rice and peas, among other ingredients. The company says its nutritionist planned the product to replace between 50 and 80 per cent of users' daily food intake.

It is not sold as a weight-loss product. It has about 500 calories, similar to those found in a well-filled British sandwich.

The company is aiming at another industry, with its fair share of quirky, workaholic young dudes, the finance sector. Here, the old-style liquid lunch is on the way out — often replaced by a run or a workout at the gym.

Huel co-founder Julian Hearn, who started the business with £250,000 of his own money, expected techies to be early adopters of the food.

“They're more progressive, more open to new ideas, more willing to accept science,” Mr Hearn says.

I tried the product over the past weekend. Sunday lunch consisted of a 600ml glass of plain Huel with a shot of pineapple and coconut flavouring.

It was pleasant and quite satisfying. I did not feel remotely hungry again until evening. Supper was a Huel bar, which was OK, but quite dry and kind of righteous.

I am now on the verge of becoming a fan of Huel and its like. In a way, it is a brilliant reimagining of what would once have been called “invalid food”. A relative with Crohn's disease, who has lived mostly on medically prescribed liquid food for 40 years, is baffled by my son's regimen.

It does seem a little sad for healthy people to reduce food to refuelling. Meals make a punctuation point and social focus.

But when we look at the drawn-out, physically debilitating and largely non-productive procedure that is the classic business lunch, there is an advantage to just swallowing a glass of gloop and getting on with work.

As part of what might be called a mixed economy gastronomy, these foods could be the lunch of the future for more of us.