Strawberry sundae, carrot cake, lemon drizzle, berry delight … You can have any flavour of Nakd bar you like, as long as you like dates. Squished together into a caramelly goo, before being mixed with chopped nuts and dried fruit, flavoured with spices and shaped into bars, dates are the backbone of every product in the range. “We do actually call it date goo,” says the brand’s development manager, Mirka Butalova, holding an enormous log of it in her hands.
We are at the company’s head offices, on a Buckinghamshire business park. On the table before us is an assortment of bars, all containing between 40% and 55% dates. Nakd is one of the biggest consumers in the UK, purchasing 2,000 tonnes of the dried fruit yearly.
Earlier, snapping on a par of latex gloves, Butalova had demonstrated how the company’s cacao and orange bar is made. You mix the dates with chopped cashew nuts and raisins, and add cacao powder and orange essence before smushing the whole thing and shaping it into bars. It looks exactly like Play-Doh. I can’t figure out if I want to play patty-cake with it or eat it.
Since it was founded 14 years ago, Nakd has ridden the coat-tails of the healthy snacking revolution to become a national success story, with £2.6m of sales in 2018, up 11% from 2017. This is a business empire built on dates. And it’s not the only one. Snacking brands The Primal Pantry, The Protein Ball Co, RAW and Livia’s Kitchen all use dates as a core ingredient in their ranges.
Not so long ago, dates were an exotic luxury rarely seen in the UK. Perhaps they would be eaten at Christmas, scrawny and puckered in polystyrene packaging, bearing scant resemblance to their voluptuous medjool peers. In Middle Eastern households, such as the one I grew up in, dates are ever-present, arranged on silver platters ready to be served to visiting guests with hot sweet tea. Now the whole of the UK has gone gaga for them – even if it is more as an ingredient than as a treat in its own right.
This boom is a product of consumer demand for alternatives to refined sugar. Dates may be 80% sugar themselves, but because they are high in fibre, your body absorbs it more gradually, so your blood sugar levels won’t spike as much as they would if you ate a chocolate bar. Handily, the fibre in dates can also aid in easing constipation. With the rise of wellness culture, dates have become a sort of cure-all, the glue in everything from cookies to cake.
The woman who probably kickstarted our obsession with dates is Sarah Britton, the Canadian writer behind the healthy recipe blog My New Roots. Her 2011 recipe for raw brownies – medjool dates, walnuts, cacao, almonds and sea salt – was the first to use dates as a sugar substitute and has been widely imitated – a Google search for “date brownies” returns more than 41m results. “It has been redone so many times,” Britton says. She devised the recipe while working at a raw food restaurant in Copenhagen. “I think it’s so popular because it’s so easy to make. If you have a food processor, you can do it. It’s a super-satisfying treat that’s good for you.”
Yet the halo effect around dates can encourage overconsumption. “At the end of the day, the sugar in dates is sugar,” warns the dietitian Priya Tew. “It is easier to view these foods as healthier and eat them in larger amounts because of this, which could lead to you consuming more sugar and calories than you would in a regular brownie.”
You can see the obsession with dates as symptomatic of our modern-day anxieties around food. The wellness industry has been criticised for encouraging disordered eating, and the perception that there are “clean” or “unclean” foods. “There is no such thing as a ‘guilt-free’ food, because no food is bad for you,” says Eve Simmons of the anti-diet-culture blog Not Plant Based. Instead of finding ways to make brownies healthier using dates, Simmons thinks that you should just eat a regular brownie. “Studies show that the more we deny ourselves certain food, or categorise food as ‘good’ and ‘bad’, the more likely we are to develop an unhealthy relationship with it.”
And there are ethical considerations that may escape many health-conscious foodies.
The date palm tree flowers across the Middle East and north Africa, with every date-producing region fiercely proud of its crop. (Although medjool dates are the best-known, purists prefer black-brown Iranian piarom dates for their richer flavour.)
Yasmin Khan, author of Zaitoun: Recipes and Stories from the Palestinian Kitchen, explains that dates are central to many Middle Eastern cultural rituals: you feed dates to a woman after she has given birth, and break your fast during Ramadan with a date. Every Middle Eastern home will have a box somewhere.
She has watched with enthusiasm the popularity of dates explode in recent years (“There is something so comforting about dates”) but also some concern. “I find it wonderful that wellness embraces traditional Middle Eastern ingredients such as pomegranates, tahini and dates, but I also find it frustrating, because food doesn’t exist in a vacuum. All food reflects the social and political context in which it is grown.”
Dates are grown in some of the most contested land in the world. Seventy per cent of the dates grown by Israeli settlers on Palestinian land in the West Bank are exported internationally, although the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign urges consumers to avoid such goods.
Khan urges western consumers to think carefully about the provenance of their dates. “We shouldn’t celebrate certain aspects of Middle Eastern culture while remaining silent on the issues facing people in the Middle East.” Khan herself buys Palestinian dates, which are darker in colour, as Palestinian farmers have less water to irrigate their crops. “I eat them every day,” she says. “They’re a great snack food.”
