Soylent
Definition
Soylent is a food replacement produced by a startup company working on the future of food.[1]
Origin
Soylent began in early 2013 as a personal experiment. Rob Rhinehart, then working on a failing telecoms startup in San Francisco, decided that food was consuming an unreasonable share of his time and money, worked through the nutritional literature, ordered the constituent compounds in bulk, and lived on the resulting mixture for a month. He documented this in a blog post titled "How I Stopped Eating Food," which circulated widely and turned an idiosyncratic self-experiment into a product.
A crowdfunding campaign followed, raising well over a million dollars in pre-orders, and the company shipped its first powder in 2014. Subsequent products included a ready-to-drink bottled version, a coffee variant, and a food bar; the bar and one powder formulation were withdrawn in 2016 after reports of gastrointestinal illness, later attributed to an ingredient supplier. Rhinehart stepped down as chief executive in December 2017, and the company was acquired by the consumer-products firm Starco Brands in February 2023.[2]
The Name
The product is named for the 1973 film Soylent Green, itself loosely adapted from Harry Harrison's 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room!. In the film, "soylent green" is a food ration made — in the line the whole culture remembers — of people. Naming a meal replacement after it was a deliberate joke, and one that did a great deal of the marketing work: it signalled that the founders knew exactly how the product looked, and declined to be embarrassed by it.
What Makes It Interesting Anthropologically
Soylent's nutritional claims are unremarkable; complete liquid nutrition has existed in clinical use for decades, and meal replacement shakes are an old category. What was new was the framing.
Soylent proposed that eating is an engineering problem with a solution, and that the solution is to stop. Its early marketing treated meals as overhead: time spent shopping, cooking, deciding and washing up, all of it recoverable. This is the logic of optimisation applied to a domain that had been considered exempt from it, and the reaction it provoked — considerably stronger than the product warranted — indicates how much cultural work eating actually does.
The objections were rarely nutritional. They were that meals are how households organise a day, how friendships are conducted, how cultures transmit themselves, and how most people mark the boundary between work and not-work. A product that removes eating removes those too, and the users who reported the greatest satisfaction were frequently those who described being relieved of exactly that social scheduling. Rhinehart's own writing during this period — on eliminating dishes, furniture, laundry and a fixed home — made the underlying position explicit: the frictions of embodied domestic life are inefficiencies, and can be engineered away.
Related Reading
References
- ↑ Original crowdfunding campaign; see also Soylent (meal replacement).
- ↑ Soylent acquired by Starco Brands, TechCrunch, 21 February 2023.
