There is a person on every packet of food in Britain. You have never met them, they do not exist, and every single nutritional claim you have ever read was written for their body, not yours.
They live on exactly 2,000 kilocalories a day. Their salt allowance is 6 grams. Their fat budget is 70 grams, their sugar 90, their saturated fat a precise 20. These are the numbers behind those little percentage circles printed on the side of your cereal box – the ones that say things like "31% of your reference intake" in a font sized for mice. The person those percentages refer to is a regulatory invention: a standardised adult conjured into existence by the European Commission in the 1990s and written into law. Britain still follows the framework, so every crisp packet, every ready meal, every protein bar in every Tesco in the country is still addressed to a ghost.
How the Ghost Was Born
The 2,000 kcal figure was not produced by a team of scientists tracking what real people actually burn in a day. It was chosen partly because it sits in a reasonable middle ground. More importantly, though, it makes the maths tidy. An even number is easier to regulate, easier to print, easier for a committee to agree on.
The original figure came largely from American dietary guidelines, which themselves had been shaped by food industry lobbying during the 1970s and 80s. When European regulators needed a single number for food labelling, they borrowed it. A 1990s approximation of a middling American adult, laundered through Brussels, is now the benchmark for what a healthy day looks like on a British supermarket shelf.
If you try to reconstruct what the ghost actually eats in a day from the label maths alone, it is oddly specific and oddly bland. Around 260 grams of carbohydrate, 50 of protein, three litres of water. Sedentary enough that 2,000 calories keeps their weight steady – not a manual worker, not an athlete, probably not a teenager. No particular medical conditions. No hormonal quirks. No particular stress. They have never been pregnant. They are, in other words, nobody in particular, drafted to stand in for everybody.
What 31% Means to a Real Person
Here is where it gets quietly strange. A 5ft 2in woman doing a desk job might genuinely run on around 1,600 calories a day. For her, that "31% of reference intake" is closer to 39% – not on the label, just silently true. A tall man doing physical work might need 2,800, so the same figure shrinks to 22%. Neither of them is being given wrong information exactly, just information calibrated to a person who doesn't share their body.
That matters most around nutrients where getting it right is not trivial. Salt is the obvious one. The ghost's 6-gram limit reflects the point at which most adults start to see blood pressure effects, but that threshold shifts. It shifts with age, kidney health, a fair few other factors. A 70-year-old reading the same packet as a healthy 30-year-old is looking at a number that has very little to do with them.
For more on the odd history of what presenting itself as safe or beneficial can involve, see When a Painting Could Kill You – it turns out food packaging is not the first place that has happened.
Why Nobody Changed It
The short answer is that the system is embedded. Changing a reference figure means reprinting every label across an entire food industry simultaneously, which nobody wants to fund. It also means agreeing on a replacement number, which means choosing whose body becomes the new ghost. Older? Younger? More active? Any choice annoys someone.
The slightly longer answer is that vague information is not always accidental. A label that says 31% of something is communicating just enough to feel informative without committing to much. It tells you the direction of travel – high, low, middling – without making a promise your particular metabolism might disprove.
What You Can Do with This
Knowing the ghost exists changes how you read a label. The percentages are ballpark guides, not precise measures of what your body needs today, in this season, at this age, doing this much moving around.
The salt figure is probably worth taking seriously even if you're not the ghost. The calorie ceiling is probably wrong for most people in one direction or the other. And the person the label was written for? They are still there on every packet, quietly eating a very average dinner and representing nobody in particular.
