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Food

Diet Gadgets Are Ruining Our Relationship with Eating

From the Bite Counter to the Vessyl cup, all these diet gadgets are doing is turning eating into a strange, surveilled science.
Foto: Valerie Renée | Flickr | CC BY 2.0

The new hunger for food gadgets, epitomised by the Vessyl cup, HAPIfork, and Bite Counter (let's call it what it is—a Terror Wrist), seems unstoppable. But it is also a fallacy. These aren't food gadgets; they're dieting gadgets. And they're not going to fill that anxious, bored, sad gap that lurks below so much of what we eat.

The HAPIfork, "powered by Slow Control," is a rainbow-coloured misery shovel that vibrates when a programmer in Hong Kong decides you're eating too fast. It's the ungodly bastard love child of "clean eating" and a Fisher Price "My First Fork" utensil set.

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The Bite Counter—a Casio watch with passive aggressive tendencies—inserts itself between your very hand-to-mouth existence, to tell you that you're not nibbling delicately enough. It is your bitter, etiquette-obsessed French aunt, made digital. The Vessyl cup—a tippee beaker for the Bridget Jones generation—claims to identify and "aggregate the makeup of everything you drink", to help you lose weight, stay hydrated, regulate caffeine, build muscle, sleep better, and regulate sugar, to upload "all of your nutrient data to your mobile device… for more accurate net calories and hydration awareness."

In other words, it will tell you that you're drinking a pint of stout at 7 AM and that you're going to have to do a fuckload of running to work that black gold off.

The appetite for innovative food technology is nothing new. But, while the wall-mounted vegetable slicers, plug-in buffet warmers and microwaveable egg poachers of my grandmother's generation helped you to make food you could enjoy, this new slew of gadgets seems designed, specifically, to take all enjoyment out of food. To distance you from it, to science-ify it, until you see food as a complicated, unfathomable obstacle, around which you can only navigate with the aid of technology.

A talking plate or smartphone gluten calculator encourages us to consider food as something over which we can pore with a forensic, dispassionate gaze, rather than chew, swallow, and love.

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It all makes me desperately sad. You could spend hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds on this sort of clicking, ticking, buzzing bullshit and still be left weeping in the bread aisle. The UK diet industry was estimated last year to be worth £2 billion. You could not make that kind of money if it all actually worked. People wouldn't need to keep buying things if the things they were buying actually made them thinner, healthier, or happier. Instead, these purchases are slowly eroding one of our fundamental human relationships—our relationship to what we eat.

Of course, for many people—myself included—food can be used as a weapon of self-destruction. We shovel snacks into our faces at lightning speed in a desperate attempt to satiate some deeper, more complicated need. Or, we build up a hunger-boredom loop where meals become short glimpses of self-love in an otherwise slate grey day.

People who suffer disordered eating, of course, need help to build better eating patterns. But I don't think these matte black calorie-counting, vibrating, self-tracking gadgets are really aimed at those people. Instead, these are just the latest apparatus in a long-fought campaign to stress us into buying things we don't need and to transform our low self-esteem into a profit.

The Diet Chef, now available in Tescos, are small, heavily-packaged, calorie-counted, joyless meals that take all the cooking and thinking out of what you eat. The Handy Gourmet Fat Magnet demands that you freeze your every ingestion beforehand, then skim off any of that nasty, scary (and actually quite tasty and important) fat before you eat it. Tweet What You Eat uses the heady blend of public shame and iPhone technology to make you sweat over your every mouthful.

Do we really need to inject this level of fear, planning, analysis, and self-reproach into our food? Do we really want to have to scan every barcode so some inanimate app can give our heart's desires an A to D health rating? Do we really want to tweet what we eat to an audience of critical strangers, be told by our utensils that we're chewing with gusto or rely on someone in a factory, behind a plastic seal, to decide what we're putting in our soup?

If we keep taking the hands-on, carefree, sticky-fingered love away from food then, eventually, we're going to stop wanting to eat it. Or, we're just going to eat a lot less of it in a super-aware, mindful state of joyless refuelling.

Isn't the joy of eating sometimes losing ourselves to animal instincts? To be absorbed by that person across the table, to stand idly by the fridge and pick at leftovers, to chow down on a bowl of something steaming in front of a film, to munch through acres of crunching, crackling, crumbling snacks at our desks?

At the risk of sounding like Arnold Schwarzenegger, eating is not cheating. Food is not bad. And a whole an arsenal of digital technology is never going to make you as happy as a slice of hot, buttered toast.