Saturday, February 7, 2026 |
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Does anyone remember when lunch was meant to be forgettable? A sandwich, crisps, a drink, change from a fiver and back to your desk. Now, a wander into Pret or atis can leave you staring down a £15 salad bowl and wondering when a functional midday meal became a minor financial decision. These aren't sad desk lunches, to be fair. They're glossy, protein-rich constructions with roasted vegetables, seeds, dressings and moral reassurance baked in. But they're also big, calorific and quietly heavy, blurring the line between "healthy choice" and full-scale dinner. Nutritionist Jo Travers argues the problem isn't whole-food calories so much as scale: when lunch is no longer cheap or daily, it no longer needs limits. Bigger feels better, healthier justifies heavier, and before you know it, lunch costs £15 and demands a lie-down.
Wine, meanwhile, has been unfairly dragged into the sugar panic. In reality, sugar is the reason wine exists: yeast turns grape sugar into alcohol, and in most dry wines, very little is left behind. The majority hover between one and five grams of residual sugar per litre – negligible when you consider a bottle is 750ml. Where things go wrong is with industrial wines engineered to taste ripe and plush, sometimes with sugar added for balance. Labels don't help: "extra-dry" prosecco is anything but. The trick is knowing what to look for – genuinely dry styles, and fizz labelled brut, extra brut or brut nature. Rosamund Hall's most useful point is also the most calming: wine is often lower in sugar than alcohol-free alternatives, which rely on sugar for flavour and mouthfeel. Drink what you enjoy; don't fear the chemistry.
If winter feels endless, a good curry remains one of the most reliable morale boosters available. Ryan Riley's cauliflower and potato coconut curry is a reminder that comfort doesn't require hours of simmering. A fragrant paste of shallots, garlic, ginger, lime and spices is cooked until sweet and aromatic, coconut milk and potatoes soften gently, cauliflower follows, and a final spoon of peanut butter brings velvety depth rather than heaviness. It's the kind of food that restores rather than overwhelms: warm, nourishing and steadying, best eaten slowly with rice and no apology.
Then there's the Nordic diet, quietly positioning itself as the Mediterranean's colder cousin: rye instead of sourdough, smoked fish instead of olives, berries rather than citrus. UK interest is surging thanks to breakfasts that look good, come together fast and don't feel like diet food. Research links Nordic-style eating to improved cholesterol and blood sugar control, but its appeal is also cultural: smörgåsbord plates, dill-heavy flavours and Scandi bakeries making "eating well" feel abundant, not restrictive.
Finally, winter comfort cooking leans into time itself. Richard H Turner's slow-cooked beef shin, pork neck vindaloo and creamy chicken with leeks remind us that food can warm a home as much as a body. These are dishes that reward patience: marrow glistening in shin, collagen-rich pork melting into curry, chicken proving it can be just as comforting as beef when treated properly. Slow cooking isn't nostalgia; it's resistance.
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Hang on, £15 salads – when did eating lunch at your desk become so expensive? |
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As Just Eat rolls out an AI voice assistant to help users choose what to have for dinner, Hannah Twiggs asks what it means when we outsource not just cooking and ordering, but the decision itself – and whether convenience has finally gone too far
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Does anyone remember sub-£3 meal deals? A sandwich, crisps and a drink for less than the price of a fancy coffee. Not good food, necessarily, but comprehensible food. Cheap, filling, forgettable. Lunch: done.
I was in a Pret a Manger the other day and found myself staring at an array of large salad bowls hovering around the £15 mark. Fifteen. They looked virtuous, they looked plentiful, they looked like something you could eat and feel pleased about. But 15 pounds? On lunch? With no drink, no snack, no polite nod to the idea that this is meant to be a functional meal in the middle of a working day? What, exactly, happened here?
This isn't just another Pret problem. An atis has opened near my office, drawing in the hedge-fund-adjacent crowd from nearby buildings, bowls in hand. Honest Greens has made its London debut. Farmer J has turned school-tray dinners into something approaching chic. Even Robuchon – Robuchon! – now has a deli bar. Whole Foods has long offered a build-your-own salad bar at £2.40 per 100g, which sounds reasonable until you realise how quickly 400g becomes 600g, becomes £14, becomes a small internal reckoning at the till. The Salad Project, which launched in London in 2021 and now has seven sites, reportedly sells around 4,000 salads a day, some of which cost up to £20, with queues snaking around the corner.
This is not a niche operation for the health-curious. That is an economy.
Something has gone slightly awry if the best-value salad bar in central London now lives in the basement of Fortnum & Mason, where £10 will still buy you a veritable pile of roast meat, grains and vegetables – wellness, but with change from a tenner.
Read the full article here
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