Colin Hartley, 47, a facilities coordinator from Swindon, entered the chilled aisle of his local supermarket at 6.40pm on Tuesday with a modest and, he believed, achievable goal: one yoghurt. Not a special one. Just a yoghurt, the sort you eat with a teaspoon while standing at the fridge in your socks.
Twenty-two minutes later he was being steered towards the self-checkouts by a member of staff, quietly repeating the words ‘a bit of fruit on the bottom’.
‘Every pot had a number on the front, and the number was always huge,’ said Colin. ‘Twenty-five grams. Thirty. Thirty-five. They were in black packaging with names that sounded like wrestlers. I picked one up and it felt heavy, and not because of the weight. It felt like it had expectations of me.’
Colin said the tubs seemed to have been built for a different sort of customer, one who owns a shaker bottle and refers to Wednesday as ‘leg day’. ‘I’m not saying they looked like they could bench-press me,’ he said. ‘But I wouldn’t have argued with one.’
It Only Got Stranger
Things escalated further along the shelf, where Colin found a ready meal helpfully labelled ‘Protein Ready-Meal for Your Protein’. He read the label three times, then checked the shelf above in case it was a prank by someone in the warehouse.
‘I think it’s a lasagne,’ he said. ‘It’s possible it’s a lasagne that has been to the gym. I didn’t want to ask it anything.’
It was at this point that Colin realised the plain yoghurt, once the default setting of the entire dairy industry, had quietly become the decaf option. ‘It’s like asking for decaf at a roadside coffee van,’ he said. ‘They’ll sell it to you, but they’ll ask if you’re sure, and there’ll be a pause.’
He was eventually approached by Shannon Okafor, 26, a chilled goods assistant, who looked left and right before leaning in.
‘She whispered, ‘We keep the plain ones out the back, mate,” said Colin. ‘Like it was something I’d ordered off a menu in a back alley. I said I didn’t want to cause any trouble, and she said, ‘Don’t worry, you’d be surprised. We get a few a week. Mostly dads, mostly after six.”
A Nation Quietly Building Muscle
The boom in added-protein products, now covering yoghurts, crisps, pasta, popcorn, bread and even water, has been driven by gym culture, social media fitness trends and the rise of weight-loss jabs. Dr Helen Marsh, a dietitian, said the trend was not entirely daft.
‘Protein is a perfectly good nutrient and plenty of people could do with a bit more of it,’ she said. ‘The trouble is that we’ve started treating it like a personality. Somewhere along the way, a pot of yoghurt became a statement about who you are.’
I should say at this point that I am in no position to judge. I, James, a grown man who writes jokes about biscuits for a living, have bought protein crisps. I ate them on the sofa, and I felt nothing but smugness. They were mostly just crisps, but I felt as though I had done a deadlift. I have since told three people, one of whom was my mum, and she did not care.
This, I suspect, is the real genius of the whole thing. Nobody is actually fooled. We just like to feel as though we’re doing something while sitting down.
Colin, for his part, did the sensible thing and gave in. He selected a vanilla yoghurt boasting 30g of protein, paid at the self-checkout and carried it out to the car park, where something odd happened.
‘I felt strong,’ he said. ‘Properly strange. I looked at the tarmac and felt a pull towards it, like I should drop and give it twenty.’
He did not do the press-up. He did, however, return his trolley to the bay without being asked, and stood a little straighter while doing it, which is surely how it starts.
