Every year, around this time, the soup-based WhatsApp group I’m in bursts into life like a cacophony of red, orange and flame-hued trees. Cosy season has arrived, and with it hearty bowls of vegetable, chicken noodle and the all-healing funeral soup. The WhatsApp group is called “Soup Share” and is in its ninth autumn. You may be already thinking, “Why isn’t it called Soup Group? That’s a much better name than Soup Share” and while that may be the case, it has been called Soup Share since 2016 and at least one group member – we number in our dozens – has been ousted for attempting to stage a coup and change the name.
Soup Share is concerned mostly with sharing the soups we’ve been enjoying, soups we see on menus, and interesting soup recipes. The price of soup is often a hot topic – one member spotted a bowl of common vegetable for €9 in a Dublin city centre hotel once. And we are not above a supermarket soup. Cully and Sully, Avonmore, own brands, they all have a place on Soup Share.
It was a supermarket soup that caused consternation in the group this week though. The group’s founder, a veritable soup savant, reported that a well-known legacy brand is bringing out a range of “high-protein soups”. Branding everything as “high protein” or simply as a “protein” version of itself has reached fever pitch. Protein cereal, protein mousse, protein pancakes, protein cheese. Next it will be “protein Toilet Duck” and “protein cushions”. Enough! When will the protein bubble burst?
Social media and indeed the entire internet is awash with fitness and wellness people telling us we’re not eating enough protein, we’re eating too much protein, we’re eating protein but with the wrong things or in the wrong forms. It has truly started to feel like a protein panic. Protein for weight loss, protein for muscle gain, protein for diabetes, protein for sleep, protein for the unbearable burden of surviving in a capitalist society. If the Instagrammers and TikTokkers are to be believed, protein is the only way out or up.
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It feels to me like just another repackaged diet culture tenet that has trickled down from the extremes of the gym, weightlifting and “counting macros” worlds to the supermarket shelves. Over the years diet culture has seen us turn against fat and carbs, two of the three “macros” or macronutrients, leaving protein as the lord and saviour. The “clean-eating” craze of the mid-late 2010s has evolved and the chicken breast and broccoli gym diets have clashed and merged with grim Slimming World hacks so that I’m now being served a recipe for “high protein rocky road” on Instagram, which consists of Weetabix, chocolate protein mousse and one sad crumbled up Rich Tea biscuit. Cottage cheese, that old mucker of the diet culture world, is once again flying high, replacing everything from yoghurt to butter in increasingly deranged recipes.
I’ve fallen victim to it myself, eschewing nutritious snacks such as fruit and nuts in favour of highly processed “low sugar” protein bars in an effort to track calories and stave off hunger. Counting calories has not ended well for me in the past (it has ended up with me in a psychiatric hospital) and I’ve learned from the professionals – the registered dietitians – that a balanced diet of fats, carbs, proteins and fibre is the not so secret “secret” to a decent diet.
A US dietitian called Dr Steph Grasso went hugely viral online a few months ago with a mantra that listed the various macronutrients and their benefits and concluded with, “If you eat what you’re craving, fats, fibre, protein and carbs you’ll feel happy, have stable energy levels, feel full, feel satisfied and feel energised”. It’s less catchy written down than it was in her video, but I remember watching it for the first time, and longing for it to be that easy. Eating the right things in balance, the fun things in moderation and getting joy out of food while maintaining a well-functioning body is the holy grail. Counting and weighing and working off is not sustainable for most people and leads to misery for some. Pathologising food to the point of seeing it only as a macro in a calculation is just another reason to obsess and judge and self-sabotage, and we don’t need any more of it on our supermarket shelves.
Luckily Soup Share is a safe space with more than enough protein – in the form of bean soup recipes – to go around.