As 2024 looms into view, let’s do a mental exercise. What happened the last time you were hungry? In the mental picture you’re conjuring, are you sitting at a table, staring at a plate of tasty, nourishing food? Because you’re worth it. Or are you at a desk, ramming anything (biscuits, crisps, protein bar) into your mouth, just to stop you fainting?
Maybe you’re commuting, or speed-walking, grazing as you go, because somehow it’s become the norm that food doesn’t happen on its own, unless for very special occasions. Meals, plates, tables, cutlery – these are half-remembered dreams from the “before times”. Food has become a secondary, multitasking concern: something to be consumed as quickly as possible, while you’re doing something else, or on the way to somewhere else.
If any of this sounds unnervingly familiar, then perhaps you’ve joined the growing army of habitual British snackers, and it might be time to consider making a new year’s resolution to stop.
Britain has been outed as a nation of snackers. A recent Waitrose food and drink study of 2,000 adults, across the age groups, found that people are increasingly abandoning the concept of eating three meals a day. Almost one third (30%) now have just two meals and replace the third with snacks. Others eat only one meal, grazing the rest of the time. The most popular snacks are crisps, cake, biscuits and chocolate, before fruit, nuts and vegetables. Lunch is the most likely meal to be skipped.
One per cent of people dispense with mealtimes altogether and snack all day, consuming one never-ending meal. We’re also more likely to eat on the move, and not just on long train journeys. In the Waitrose report, 9% ate while walking or commuting.
So here we are: 21st-century Britons going about our daily business, in the car, on public transport, on the street, in the park, with food in our hands, scoffing, chomping, wolfing. Is this Generation Snack? A cohort no longer surprised by missed meals or perturbed by the calorific relentlessness of the eating cycle. Hurling down food, for a quick hit of sugar and fat. No plates, no seats, no ceremony, because – to borrow a phrase from Gordon Gekko in Wall Street – cutlery is for wimps.
This new dawn of turbo-snacking could be reframed as contemporary and groovy, an extension of the street-food revolution. Down with formal mealtimes! Food anarchy in the UK!
Until you recognise that the new accelerated snacking is tied to hybrid work practices, modern stresses and plain old poverty. That, far from being a lifestyle choice, much of it is forced upon people. How, alongside food porn culture (the sinking of emotions into culinary tastes and aromas), there could be a parallel (harder, colder) climate of food abstraction. The concept of refuelling taken to a soulless, pragmatic zenith.
Then there’s the effect on weight and health. Grabbed food is usually the wrong food. Digestion could be wrecked. The all-day snacking zone could easily become the meal without end, with people losing track of what they’ve consumed.
Research from the European Journal of Nutrition found that a quarter of people were undermining otherwise healthy eating with poor-quality snacks. Snacking has long been equated with pleasure, treats and naughtiness. Which is fine for a snack, but not when snacks are replacing meals.
I’ve been wondering why this feels so disturbing. People have been snacking forever. Why does there suddenly seem to be a human rights dimension to the humble snack? Maybe because I’m old enough to remember the widespread concern about people eating lunch at their work desks. That now quaint-seeming idea that it was nicer, more civilised, for people to leave their desks for a proper lunch. Now look at us – gloomily chowing down in office partitions like cows in a milking shed, or chickens in a coop.
To get dystopian about it, all this rushed food consumption isn’t that far off all those appalling stories about overworked warehouse employees or delivery drivers urinating into bottles because they haven’t got the time for a toilet break. It’s also probable these snacks aren’t just quicker; they’re cheaper than the healthier meals that workers are skipping.
Not that the rise of snacking is exclusive to the UK. A recent study looking into the US “snacking epidemic” found that more than 90% of Americans consume one to three snacks daily, and that (excluding people with diabetes) the average person consumes 498 calories a day in snacks alone.
Lockdown also seems to have had an effect. In one 2020 study of 10 European countries during lockdown, Britons emerged as the biggest snackers and boozers, with a 29% rise in snack consumption.
Still, what have we become? Is this the final humiliation and dehumanisation of the modern working Briton? Wandering around scavenging for food like crumb-covered beasts. What next: will the workforce be forcibly fitted with nosebags, to save even more time?
It could be time for people to stop going along with missed meals, bad nutrition and food on the go. To realise that they deserve to eat properly. Perchance to dream of sitting down. Even at an actual table. Perhaps 2024 could be the year the UK decides to yank itself out of the snack vortex.
• Barbara Ellen is an Observer columnist
