The future is now—actually it’s been here for like seven years—and it doesn’t taste very good.
There’s a discussion I like to have with my students that usually yields some interesting and strongly-held ideas. It centers on Soylent, and, after watching the company’s launch video, we talk about if meal replacement shakes are going to become the new norm. What I don’t tell them is that the video is from 2014, around the time of Soylent’s inception. In the intervening years, it seems like the Soylent model of eating (if you want to call it that) not only broadly failed, but perhaps also fueled a food movement of the very opposite nature.
In the video, the company’s old CEO and founder, Rob Rhinehart, sits in front of chemical equations and describes how, with a little research, he realized that the food we eat can—nay, should— be broken down into its simplest parts. The result of experimentation based on this ideal was a chalk-colored milkshake. Looking back, it seems borderline satirical, but the video nevertheless characterizes the drink as such:
“unlike most other foods, which prioritize taste and texture, Soylent was engineered to maximize nutrition, nourish the body in the most efficient way, to nourish the body in the most efficient way possible.”
In truth, I do know of one person who consumed Soylent with some regularity; when I was an intern in an area of Washington, D.C. with very expensive lunch places, one of the other interns, a highly-motivated programmer from just outside Beijing, popped open a bottle around 11:50 am each day. I would kill time by wandering around Dupont Circle with a crummy sandwich I had concocted at home in a rush before fast-walking to work, but this guy didn’t lose a minute of productivity. (I wasn’t nearly as busy as him, it must be said.) By and large, though, most people I’ve talked to about Soylent aren’t really swayed.
That wasn’t the case back in 2014, though. As Lizzie Wittecomb chronicled in a very funny profile of the company called ‘The End of Food’ in the New Yorker from that year, it quickly racked up millions of dollars in investment from the likes of Y Combinator and Andreessen Horowitz. In discussing Soylent, Wittecomb noted the idea of ‘lifehacking,’ or, “devising tricks to streamline the obligations of daily life, thereby freeing yourself up for whatever you’d rather be doing.”
What do we lose by such lifehacking? Oh, not much, just the social interactions that come alongside years of meals served on plates set on tables, the discovery of the natural world through cooking, and a way to connect with people with whom—aside from food—you share next to nothing in common.
Of course, the above are all well-documented arguments against Soylent. What has happened since 2014, though, is striking. To me, these days it isn’t at all weird when my old college roommate, who I used to share some of the worst beers known to man with (something called ‘Ice House ($0.90, 16 oz, 5.5% ABV’), posts a photo of the natural wine he’s just bought. Similarly, it wasn’t altogether very surprising to have dinner at a craft brewery with a list full of esoteric tasting notes in a tiny town in West Virginia during a road trip a couple of years ago.
Is the recent American renaissance of slow food, natural wine, and fermentation, strictly speaking, a rebuke of the lifehacking proposed by meal replacement foodstuffs like Soylent? Possibly, though perhaps it’s too early to tell if that, too, is a fad that will look silly in seven years. But, especially in a pandemic year when downtime has been plentiful, it appears that food can still be a space insulated from talk of streamlining and efficiency-boosting. I’ll drink to that.