Huel: An ingenious solution for modern life, or the 21st­-century workhouse gruel?

This week I’ve been feeling Christmassy, which is to say vindictive and hateful. It’s probably due to the snow falling all over campus that everyone is endlessly posting pictures of on every form of social media they can access. No one is going to get snowed in or freeze to death, which is all the worse for the College in light of the strikes. The sudden snow flurries at this time of year is incontrovertible evidence that Alice Gast is an evil ice witch, hellbent on using her powers to prevent staff from obtaining a fair pension deal. Think Frozen, but with an inability to freeze the only thing that matters: her remuneration package.

Anyway, moving on, this week I have been confronted with the monstrosity that is Huel, as one of my friends has started brandishing his bottle as a replacement for lunch. As with all those that have recently adopted a food fad, they decided that they immediately had to convert me to their way of life, by simultaneously exalting their new unparalleled existence and denigrating my own. Imagine a pushy vegan, but one that only eats one thing. Huel is described on its website as “Nutritionally complete food, simply delivered.” This I agree with, if you want your nutrition delivered with a side of self-hate. Drinking Huel is like choking down a grey soup of misery, because it is in essence just workhouse gruel for the 21st Century. This is probably why I am surprised that it has become fashionable with those of middling income as condemning people to consume colourless, flavourless liquids is normally the preserve of the ruling classes, or those enduring futuristic dystopias. I still don’t understand why they offer different flavours: as the saying goes, you can’t polish a turd.

“Huel is going to ruin lunchtimes as well as tasting terrible”

Huel as a foodstuff is consumed as a time saving measure, to increase the efficiency of human life and reduce the amount of time spent preparing and eating food. As an ardent traditionalist, the idea of making our lives ever more efficient can result in only one inevitable trend. The removal of the work lunchtime, or the space in the day that all employers have been obliged to give their workforce since the beginning of time. By allowing Huel to be adopted across the whole spectrum of society, we face the prospect of being given the barest amount of time to add the powder to our Huel branded shakers, before adding water, shaking it around and chugging it down in a bare 5 minutes. This should obviously be completed while wearing the Huel branded T-shirt that they send out as part of their insidious advertising campaign.

What I’m getting at is, as usual, that whoever uses this product should feel unbearable, soul-crushing guilt, as they are going to totally ruin lunchtimes, as well as subject the rest of us to a flavourless future. In the name of inefficiency, I beg you to dispose of your Huel branded shakers, and send this blind futurism where it belongs: back to the smug Scandinavians.