When I lived abroad, one of the things I missed most about Britain was a meal deal. I really did. It’s something we take for granted , the ability to go to any major supermarket and pick up enough food to tide you over until dinner, edible on the move, for a knockdown price. They don’t do it like this in other countries, generally. I can hear a Frenchman somewhere hon-hon-honing about the fact that our food culture is so pitiful, we have convinced ourselves we actually like eating an overrefridgerated supermarket sandwich out of a cardboard box and calling it lunch. He’s right, but here we are. I like a meal deal.
I don’t want any mathematicians to email me about this, but it is my understanding that there are several thousand possible combinations you can make out of the main-plus-snack-plus-drink offering. Aside from being convenient, cost- and time-effective, there’s something deeply personal, perhaps even beautiful, about a meal deal. I experience it as a little buffet for one, and get the same sort of nut-gathering satisfaction from buying a meal deal as I get from buying a curated selection of snacks at a train station for a long journey.
I like to get a sandwich or a wrap, the flavour depending on my mood, a bag of Quavers or a yoghurt, and a Diet Coke. You can intuit a lot about a person from their meal deal selection. Consider two people: one getting ready salted crisps, a BLT and a San Pellegrino, the other a spicy chicken pasta pot, the hard-boiled egg two-pack and a banana Yazoo. Which one would you rather have as your babysitter?
Earlier this week, shoppers noticed that Sainsbury’s had, quietly but unmistakably, shaken the very foundations of the meal deal. A yoghurt is no longer classed as a snack. It is now classed as a main.
Listen, I like yoghurt. It’s a good food. An easy, guilt-free dessert option after your dinner, fun as part of breakfast too. Versatile little guy, the yoghurt. But to be told that we must now think of a yoghurt as a main dish within the sacred bounds of the meal deal is to be told a lie. A yoghurt is not a main. You know this, I know this. The population of Britain knows this. And we have made our knowledge heard. Outrage has followed the yoghurt revelation, protests that this cannot be real, that the new classification flies in the face of what every person knows to be true: that a yoghurt is not, I say again, a main.
Is the justification that a yoghurt might form the main part of a breakfast, which is, after all, a meal? Could be. But again: we are being sold a pup here. What kind of person is buying a meal deal for breakfast? The meal in question in a meal deal is lunch.
So fine, I thought. Have it your way, Sainsbury’s. I will buy one of your meal deals with yoghurt as a main, and see whether it can hold its own as the primary component of lunch. I bought their own-brand Greek yoghurt with a scattering of granola on top, sort of panicked in the face of having to choose a substantial savoury snack and went for the “trio of olives”, and finished off with a thick smoothie for added sustenance. You don’t need me to tell you that I was hungry by 4pm. Don’t make me prostrate myself here with details of my emergency second lunch/early first dinner. Of course it did not make a meal. It’s a yoghurt.
Perhaps this doesn’t really matter. I mean, plainly, it is not one of life’s great injustices, to be deprived of the option to eat a sandwich as well as a yoghurt and wash it down with a fizzy drink, or a juice, for only £3.50. But I hate it. Not only on principle, but because it is yet another flick of the knife in the death-by-a-thousand cuts experience of shopping in the UK these days. Everything costs too much. The meal deal felt like one of the last bastions of good value. And now we all stand, powerless and hungry, watching it crumble.
Imogen West-Knights is a journalist and writer. Her novel Deep Down is out now
