Blueberry Muffin Quest Bar
See the fantasy in the wrapper photo. Look in awe at the Adonis of a muffin, positively bursting with blueberries, too large to even fit on the wrapper. A live, human photographer fluffed and framed that muffin before zooming in tight to resolve every crumb and pore in laboratory-grade detail. It takes muffinness to its logical extreme, idealized and flawless. It is the body muffins aspire to have.
A Quest bar understands the cruelty of the camera, the pounds that it adds, the deadness of its freeze frame. Real life is great and all, but this isn’t real life. This is a protein bar. If it wasn’t exaggerated, you wouldn’t feel anything. It must be sweetened, molded, strained, and extruded, or else it would be dull. Invisible. Left behind. So Quest hypes it up. You can have all the romantic intensity of guilt-binge desserts through Quest’s protein-loaded simulations. It is a feat of trompe-le-langue: the texture, the flavor, all are Instagram-ready, carbless yet convincing.
Quest promises strength and beauty to ordinary people. I was one of these people. It delivered on half of its promise.
We eat Quest’s photoshop perfection because we are not perfect. Perfection is always somewhere on the horizon, unreachably distant, but we measure our progress nonetheless. The goal may be pounds on the bar or pounds off your body, but both are simply a result of the life you live. The real journey, the part you can control, is what you eat.
The plateau-busting protein bars of old were myopic, adolescent power fantasies. Powerbars and Builder bars have never understood beauty. They come loaded with sugar, tongue-bait to help you choke down their granulated whey. They hail from the cult of bulk, the feverish more-is-more legacy of the Arnold Classic, bulging biceps and beach bods. Draped in candy bar veneer, they deliver an artless punch of choco-peanut pumpfuel to push your one-rep max to the limit. If you end up a little musclebound, carrying some spare tire, well, who cares? Numbers talk. Get your gains now and shred off the fat come summertime.
Then we all realized that sucks. Eating too much sucks. Cramming sugar into your mouth sucks.
So along came Quest. We all have different journeys, and it turns out very few of those involve Harleys and muscle shirts. We want to be strong, look good, and still eat dessert. With Quest, we can.
Under no circumstances should you reach for a chocolate Quest bar, not because it is bad but because its ambitions are too limited. Reach instead for birthday cake, white chocolate raspberry, cookies and cream, apple pie, pumpkin pie, or blueberry muffin. These sinful confections are objects of study, subjects for transmutation. Quest wrings out their sweetness and discards their earthly, fattening forms. Quest stretches and reshapes them into something slim, svelte, and airless, a tight little bar that practically disappears into a Lululemon pocket or sleeve. It has no unsightly bulges, no flab or squish. It is taut and firm. You recognize the flavor, but not the shape. It turns out there was a slim and beautiful body in each of them all along.
You don’t just open the wrapper, you strip it. It peels off tighter than hosiery, exfoliating the bar with a hiss. The bar has been squeezed and shaped by its compression clothing. The seam along the back has cut a line into the bar, a straight spine molded from when the soft, hot bar slumped into its wrapper to cool. No matter how you flex or bend it, that mark will not fade.
The bar’s color is a mottled caramel brown somewhere between Graham cracker and almond butter. Its smooth surface is broken up by deep, velvety shreds of blueberries and white, unidentifiably synthetic cobbler chunks. When you tear off a bite, you are rewarded: the cobbler chunks explode into ultrasweet powder, the blueberries are bright and tangy in your mouth. The texture is calculated for a planned demolition, the corn husk fiber retaining just enough elasticity to make it through the bite without devolving into graininess or gumminess. No muffin, cake, or pie chews like this, but every protein bar should.
The first Quest bar is good. But the real measure of a protein bar isn’t whether you enjoy it. It’s whether you keep eating it. It’s whether you keep showing up, even when it hurts, even when you don’t want to force down a couple hundred more calories, but you know it’s what your program calls for. Sometimes you reach for two. Sometimes it’s your whole meal. It’s more or less the same routine over and over, different flavors and different sensations but all essentially the same mix of strain, wait, hurt, eat, rest. You look in the mirror after an Apple Pie Quest Bar. You look in the mirror after a Birthday Cake Quest Bar. You look in the mirror after a Mint Chocolate Chip Quest Bar. You eat, twist, stretch, and see everything except perfection.
Quest Bar was made for this. Its fantasy never shatters, never even strains. It is an inverted portrait of Dorian Gray: in some nameless lab, generations of muffins were baked and dissected, dying for this bar's beauty. Their secrets were tortured out via scalpel and bunsen burner, inserted into the waiting husks of stripped-down corn kernels, then reanimated and reforged in fire. With nut butter their protein foundation, natural flavors their supplement, a shelf-stable body is shaped. Unlike us, it will remain strange and gorgeous forever.
You will settle for feeling beautiful and strong even just occasionally. Your Quest has no end. You will end up far from home, far from the life and food you once knew. By mysterious means you will attain the lean gains of legend, power without bulk. This will change you as it did me. Eventually, looking into that same mirror, wrapper in hand, protein bar settling in your stomach, you will not quite recognize yourself. Perhaps you’ve looked too closely for too long. Perhaps you miss a time when you were softer, less tense.
The cost of attaining beauty and strength is not just pain. It is foreignness to yourself.
