I am proud to say I have never tried Huel. Despite a flatmate once accusing me of consuming a diet primarily made up of beige mush, the idea of consuming my daily calories in the blandest, swiftest and most sensorily-monotonous way – a liquid meal replacement drink – has never appealed. If I ever need a “nutritionally complete” struggle meal on the go, I see no issue with shovelling peanut butter straight from the jar into my mouth.
According to the Science Museum’s Future of Food exhibition, which explores the past and future of food production, focusing on how food needs to evolve in the face of environmental crisis, I should think again. Object no. E2024.0330.1, the first Huel product to be developed back in 2015, contains more than just 1.7kg of uninspiring meal replacement powder. Instead, Huel – short for ‘human fuel’ – might be the sustainable solution to the interlocking polycrises of modern food production, from the over-extraction and pollution depleting our planet’s fragile ecosystems to the disastrous health implications of our ultra-processed diets.
Then again, it might not. But it’s impossible to deny that the neighbouring object on display in the exhibition – a large, rusty cooking pot, the kind used by communal kitchens across the world – at least looks considerably less futuristic. You could make soup in that pot, or a perpetual stew of the sort maintained on the stoves of medieval taverns. A solution, perhaps, but few would say a futuristic one. Stew is not sci-fi or sexy. Stew is not avant garde.
Food scientists, nutritionists and ecologists are interested in cooking up the food of the future, but for marketers and consumers, the question of what that future looks like is perhaps equally important. Scientists see cricket burgers and 3D printed steaks as a solution to the problems created by beef overproduction, including increased greenhouse gas emissions from the methane farted by cows, but in order for those products to sell, they have to be made palatable and culturally acceptable to eaters. Case in point: when Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods launched their plant-based burgers back in 2016, both were marketed as “burgers that bleed”, positioned as just as good as “the real thing”.
At the same time, we’ve long been fascinated by the more fantastical aspects of future food. 20th century sci-fi and fantasy provides a feast for the imagination, including delicacies such as the cow that wants to be eaten in Douglas Adams’s The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Star Trek’s food “replicator”, and the lembas bread from Lord of the Rings, of which “one small bite is enough to fill the stomach of a grown man”. The Fifth Element features an instant food microwave which produces a full meal with the press of a button, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory a three-course dinner chewing gum.
Whether in sci-fi or the supermarket, rhetoric around future food generally follows one of two pathways. It either looks to the past, a nostalgic culinary golden age which we can “return to” – think the rugged state of nature implied by ‘paleo’, ‘raw’ and ‘carnivore diets’ – what food scholars term ‘nutritional primitivism’. Or it looks forward to a high-tech future, which encompasses both the foams and gels of molecular gastronomy and the “brave new world” of food tech, where tomorrow’s human beings live on nutritionally complete ‘human fuel’ or lab grown meat. Such innovations were once the stuff of sci-fi themselves; Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth’s 1952 The Space Merchants, on display in the Science Museum show, featured an overpopulated planet fed by a vast, pulsing blob of cultured meat known as ‘Chicken Little’.
This tension between the traditional and the avant garde cuts to the mealy core of the subject of future food. As the Science Museum’s canny juxtaposition of the Huel sack and the stew pot suggests, the reality of future food will lie somewhere in between, a mix of big ideas generated by global cooperation and small-scale, local and regional initiatives such as communal kitchens (which have been advocated by feminists since at least the 1870s). The more boring parts of future food might be the most important, whether that’s an expansion of organic food or the increased use of seed banks to promote crop diversity and stability.
Something has changed, though, since Pohl and Kornbluth dreamed up ‘Chicken Little’. 20th century food fantasies centred on abundance, the dream of ending world hunger. While there were many worms hidden in the apple, from the pollution generated by new fertilisers and pesticides to fast food’s cult of convenience, there’s no denying that this dream was an admirable one. Since the prosperous West achieved that abundance in the decades following the Second World War, however, both nutritional primitivism and high-tech food seem to have become predicated on eating less. From the low-fat and low-carb alternatives popular in the nineties and noughties, to today’s meal-replacement drinks like Huel and complete nutritional supplements like AG1, and the ‘Ozempic menus’ curated for the diminished appetites of customers on weight loss drugs, today’s future food seems paradoxically about not having to eat at all.
These products seem less about promoting abundance to safeguard the future of the species than harnessing the appetite to build a hyper-optimised individual body, possessed of supreme health, longevity, beauty and discipline over its appetites. Look at billionaire Bryan Johnson, whose mission to “live forever” has led him to a restrictive plant-based diet, intermittent fasting and over fifty food supplements per day. Or to return to sci-fi, in Severance food is represented through breatharian dinner parties, vending machine snacks and unpalatable eggs. Severance is a show about the risks of denial, in particular, how capitalism encourages its workers to deny themselves both grief and love, but it also depicts the denial of hunger. Human hunger reveals human vulnerability, something which, in the aftermath of Covid and facing climate catastrophe, understandably terrifies us.
Yet it is that very vulnerability which makes imagining a new future for food so essential. We are in the midst of a food crisis. Changing the way we eat is not a matter of privileged preference, but one of global survival, as one of the few extant samples of a Irish Lumper leaf, the monoculture variety wiped out during the Great Famine, displayed at the Science Museum attests. The famine, which led to the death of millions in the 1840s, echoes throughout the exhibition, particularly in a section on bananas, a global monoculture currently at risk of being wiped out by Panama Disease. The Irish Famine, like the Bengal Famine a hundred years later, was in part created by the colonial neglect of the British Empire, a stark reminder that food security is always political. As we watch another man-made famine unfold in Gaza, we would do well to recall that the food of the future must also be the food of now, and that denying the human need to eat can have horrific consequences.
Yet in popular culture, advertising and the supermarkets of the prosperous West, the future of food is less potatoes and bananas and more, well, Huel (or Huel-in-spirit), whether that’s viral protein bars, adaptogenic cocktails, or the optimised gut microbiomes promised by personalised health programmes like Zoe. Our fascination with future food is at least in part an aesthetic one, centred on how such foods make us, as individual consumers, look and feel. Without acknowledging that limitation, we might be hindering our progress towards a more sustainable food future.
