The following extract is from food writer Sophie Egan's book, Devoured. In the extract, Egan explores the connection between the working and eating habits of the ‘millennial' generation – people reaching adulthood in the early twenty-first century. The Millennial Food Psyche Wednesday, 7:00 A.M. An alarm clock blares, and a guy we'll call Josh bolts out of bed. The noise is definitely alarming because he has the alarm set to the one that sounds like bad things are happening on a submarine. Ambling into the kitchen, Josh finds his neatly lined rows of coffee pods and goes for the southern pecan flavour. Autumn has just begun, and at that particular moment, he's in the mood for something comforting. Josh is a thirty-one-year-old hardware operations quality engineer at Google. At six feet tall with pale, freckled skin, brown hair, and blue eyes, he's got somewhere between a cross-country runner's build and a 'dad-bod'¹ the latter thanks to a slight paunch that's developed since taking the Google position three years earlier (surely a small price to pay for finally having landed his dream job at the best company to work for in the country). 7:08 A.M. Josh opens his laptop and plunges deep into the Internet. With seven different windows open, his screen flashes with a whirl of activity. The number of e-mails waiting for him this morning is massive. It's not so much that the deluge has already begun, but that it never really ends. Every minute he sleeps, the more behind he gets at work. So now he takes a sip of coffee and starts firing e-mails back. Josh is a member of the millennial generation. A graduate of the University of Michigan, he's among the 61 percent of his cohort with a college degree, 15 percent higher than his parents'. He's among the 62 percent who prefer to live in mixed- use urban areas, according to a successful consumer insights firm. Work, nightlife, shopping - all at their doorsteps. Also like other millennials, he was raised on cereal, computers, and a congratulations every time he put his socks on straight. Josh scrolls through his Facebook feed and sees that his friend from a summer internship in Austin a few years back is on a two-week liquid diet. She has posted a photo of herself sipping a kale smoothie at Starbucks. Josh also sees that his sister in Portland made homemade pizza last night with gluten-free dough, topped with poached eggs from the chickens in her backyard. And Josh's former college roommate has posted from a CrossFit² box in New York, bragging about his WOD, which means 'workout of the day'. He's eating a strawberry coconut breakfast bar he got from the gym. 7:55 A.M. Josh has an 8:30 A.M. meeting, so he grabs a roasted jalapeño almond protein bar because it is non-genetically modified and gluten-free and has 10 grams of protein. He takes the keys with his other hand and heads out the door. While driving to work – which he does because he can leave when he wants, and listen to his favourite NFL podcast as loudly as he wants, because it takes five minutes longer by bus, and, well, because every minute counts these days – he remembers he's out of toilet paper and plain, non-fat Greek yogurt. When he doesn't have an early meeting, he eats Greek yogurt at home before work because one time at the airport he read in Men's Fitness that Greek yogurt is one of those foods that 'Fill You Up While You Trim Down.' Given his hectic schedule that day, he doesn't know when he'll have time to get groceries. So, at a stoplight, he takes out his phone (even though he promised his sister he'd stop doing that), opens his Instacart app, and quickly places an order. Before checkout, the page reminds him about grocery items he has purchased in the past, so he throws in some sour cream and onion ‘Popchips’, which he eats a few times a week because the label says 'all the flavour, half the fat.' Their absence of evil means it's totally fine to eat the whole bag after dinner. ¹dad-bod: a slang term in popular culture for a male physique that is not slim or toned ²CrossFit: an exclusive fitness programme in a private gym