In December of 2012, three young men were living in a tiny apartment in San Francisco, working on a technology startup. Their project – a plan to make cheap cell-towers – had failed and they were down to their last seventy thousand dollars. They resolved to keep working until they ran out of money. There was only one part of their budget they had some control over – food. They had been living mostly on ramen, corn dogs, and Costco frozen quesadillas — supplemented by Vitamin C tablets, to stave off scurvy — but the grocery bills were still adding up.
Rob Rhinehart, age 25, one of the entrepreneurs, began to resent the fact that he had to eat at all. Food was a burden to him – its cost, the time and hassle to prepare it. He tried to live on McDonald’s dollar meals and felt like he was going to die. An all-kale diet didn’t work, either. He was starving.
Rhinehart, who studied electrical engineering at Georgia Tech, began to consider food as an engineering problem. Humans don’t need milk, but amino acids and lipids. Fruits and vegetables are mostly water. He began to think that food was an inefficient way of getting what he needed to survive. So he decided to reduce food to the raw chemical components. After some study, he compiled a list of thirty-five nutrients required for survival and ordered them off the internet, mostly in powdered form, and put them into a blender with some water. Then he started living on it.
His formula is smooth but grainy in your mouth, and it has been compared to Cream of Wheat, and “my grandpa’s Metamucil.” It is like sipping a bowl of watered-down pancake batter. The downside is that it produces a lot of flatulence (though less now than with the original formula, which had too much sulfur).
He called his potion Soylent, which, for most people, evokes the 1973 science-fiction film “Soylent Green,” starring Charlton Heston. The movie is set in a dehumanized future where, because of overpopulation and pollution, people live on mysterious wafers called Soylent Green. The film ends with the ghastly revelation that Soylent Green is made from human flesh. Rhineheart’s family and friends have urged him to change the name but he insists on keeping it. (One variation by another experimenter is even labeled Soylent Green.)
After Rhinehart blogged about how healthy it made him feel and how it dropped his food bills by 89%, interest skyrocketed. He used the internet to raise funds to manufacture Soylent and got the amount in two hours. He has tapped into some deep concerns of modern life. Food is a big component of climate change – livestock cause almost fifteen percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions and a large percentage of all human usage of water goes toward agriculture. Soylent is more of a factory product than a farm product. He would even like to design a Soylent-producing “superorganism”: a single strain of alga that pumps out Soylent all day. Then even factories won’t be necessary.
The notion that we can nourish ourselves with something purer and more effective than food has long been part of our collective fantasy life. The ancient Greeks wrote about ambrosia, the food of the gods, which conferred immortality on whoever consumed it. The dawn of the space age had people dreaming about “meal pills”: in Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles,” a character keeps several weeks’ worth of food pills in a matchbox; on “The Jetsons,” food pills produce delicious taste sensations but can cause indigestion. Food dreams can easily turn into nightmares: there’s Willy Wonka’s disastrous three-course-dinner chewing gum, and, in “The Matrix,” humans are grown synthetically, in pods, where they are fed the liquefied remains of other humans, pumped in through umbilical cords.
Liquid food has been given to patients in hospital settings for decades. Fifty years ago, when a patient was too sick to eat, doctors ground up regular food and put it into feeding tubes. Eventually, companies like Abbott Nutrition, the maker of Ensure, got into the game. Food replacements became more standardized and scientific. In the early nineteen-sixties, NASA made powdered drinks famous by using Tang in its space flights.
Doctors who have looked at the formula agree that you could subsist on Soylent. But would it be a good idea? Real food contains complex chemicals which have not been fully studied yet. There are other issues as well. You begin to realize how much of your day revolves around food. Meals provide punctuation to our lives: we’re constantly recovering from them, anticipating them, riding the emotional ups and downs of a good or a bad sandwich. Soylent makes you realize how many daily indulgences we allow ourselves in the name of sustenance.
We are what we eat, literally. It is interesting to think that after a lot of people eat Soylent, Soylent becomes people. Charlton Heston might appreciate that twist. So would Jesus Christ, who said, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world. … For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him” (John 6:51,55,56).