Instructions
The health food juggernaut is seemingly unstoppable. Its tentacles reach into almost every aisle of your supermarket. Invigorating promises are splashed on everything from snacks to pet food.
Blueberries and mushrooms are no longer just delicious and nutritious, they’re ‘superfoods’. Breakfast cereals are enriched with folate, vitamins and minerals, while bread has gone ‘low-GI’. Even milk has gone from ‘natural’, to ‘low-fat’, to ‘no-fat’. What’s next? ‘No-milk’?
So where did all this focus on the health properties of food start? It seems to be a modern thing, the kind of fascination a culture develops when there’s just too much choice. In part this is true – it is only in communities with more food than they need that overconsumption becomes an issue.
In the heady days of the Roman Empire, wealthy citizens would retire to country sanitoriums to relieve themselves after indulgent excess. A lean diet, coupled with watery wine and some meditative prayer was said to revitalise the spirit.
Our modern understanding of health food began in the early 1900’s when a series of European physicians began to draw associations between the quality of a patient’s diet and their health outcomes.
Maximilian Bircher-Benner, a dour and joyless Swiss doctor, adapted a traditional alpine meal of rolled grains, juice, sweetened condensed milk, fruits and nuts, then served it to his convalescent patients with positive results. Lacking the inspiration to give his creation a marketable name, the good doctor simply referred to it as ‘die Spiese’, meaning ‘the dish’.
To reflect the dish’s softened qualities, his patients renamed it ‘moose’, an old German word for stew, from which we now get ‘muesli’.
While healthy cereal dishes like this were significant throughout the 20th century, it was really in the early 1970’s that the health-craze gathered steam. A clever salesman coupled muesli with our modern desire for convenience and so was born the muesli bar. The muesli is not soaked as it was in Dr Bircher’s original, but instead is bound in a light, stabilised caramel.
And so the plan unravels. The addition of a sugary caramel undermines the doctor’s original intention of providing a balanced and healthy meal. What was a genuinely low-calorie and low-GI offering transforms into an energy dense snack.
Problem? Maybe, but it depends on your lifestyle. For the laconic European bourgeoisie of the early 1900’s, there wasn’t much need for high-energy food. But for a young modern teenager flitting between soccer, swimming and surfing, a good muesli bar is just the thing to keep them on the go, with the added health benefits of wholegrains, seeds and fruits.
Low-GI Muesli Bars