“Ahhhhhh,” I groaned.

A surge of adrenaline shot up my spine, as I forced a full gulp of chocolate and beige colored concoction down my throat with my eyes closed. It smelled mildly of vanilla, cacao and cinnamon; the concoction had the texture of a milkshake with a little grittiness from the chia seeds, and an aftertaste of corn flour. 

I gradually opened my eyes and decided what I just ate was within the range of edibility. Victory was thus declared to my most recent food experiment: Soylent.

Some History

I read about Soylent for the first time on a blog by Brian Merchant, where he wrote about how for a whole month, he ate nothing but a liquid diet that tastes like “granular baby formula that was somehow simultaneously sugary and salty.” The first thing came to mind was the 1973 Charlton Heston sci-fi film “Soylent Green,” where people realize in the end that they have been feeding off human remains all along. It must be one of those weird food cults, I laughed at the idea. 

Soylent’s inventor, Rob Rhinehart, is a 27-year-old software engineer in California who constantly struggled to find enough time to prepare decent meals for himself. Like Rhinehart, lots of young working professionals today think it’s too expensive to eat out and too time-consuming to cook. With the help of books on biochemistry and nutrition, Rhinehart came up with a list of chemicals our bodies need to function and of supplement powders that can fulfill those needs.When put together, every Soylent powder meal costs less than $4. A culinary miracle for a New York standard. 

Rhinehart said he has lived off Soylent, which constitutes 90% of his diet, for more than a year and half. Many people like Brian Merchant and Chris Ziegler from The Verge have also tried to live entirely on it for at least a month, both of which reported losing body fat and feeling “great” about their new diet. Their stories got me hooked. Taking eight college courses, I barely have time to eat at all, let alone eat healthy. The idea of eating healthy while saving time and money just sounds too good to be true.

The Cure?

Could Soylent be the next Amazon in food, disrupting the way we perceive dining in both effectiveness and efficiency? Could Soylent offer a sustainable solution to the human diet? Rhinehart said his product is not only environmentally friendly, as it reduces animal consumption and transportation exhaust, it also has the potential to solve world hunger, as it’s cheap to make and easy to preserve. 

What if Soylent IS the cure to world hunger? I was so intrigued by the prospect that I decided to plunge right into it. Optimism overcame my doubts. 

DIY Soylent

Too impatient to order from the official website, which had more than $100,000 worth of backorders 16 months in, I decided to use the online recipe from the “DIY Forum,” where Soylent fans and followers put together their own Soylent recipe using a computer program that generates recipes based on Rhinehart’s nutrition chart. I chose the one called “QuidNYC Superfood Soylent,” designed for a 25 to 35 year old female around 130 pounds (I weigh more than that but I’m a proud overachiever. You know what I'm talking about, ladies #sorrynotsorry).

The trick to save money is to buy ingredients in bulk. I didn’t hesitate one second to order the 5-pound whey protein on Amazon, even though just a week before that, I was commenting on the gigantic pitch-black buckets of protein powder displayed in my gym, ”Who’s gonna eat that?” I snorted. 

My orders came soon after and I carried them one by one on the kitchen counter like sacks of construction materials. Using a drug scale as precise as 0.1g, I assembled my first ultramodern meal gingerly,

Organic Blue Corn Masa Flour, 200g

Navitas Naturals Organic Raw Cacao, 20g

Bob’s Red Mill Soy Lecithin Granules, 11g

Potassium Citrate, 4g

 

Then I paused. The label of potassium citrate says, “Warning: potassium is toxic, even fatal, if taken in excess.” I shivered. I remember back in college when I tried to bake muffins for my house, I mistook a tablespoon for a teaspoon by mistake. To this day, I still get mocked by my friends for making the most fatal “salty bomb pastry” they have yet eaten. But potassium is no salty muffin. What if I make a mistake on the measurement? What if the factory made a production mistake? The consequences would be severe, I reckon. Brian Merchant recalled spotting a rat running around Soylent’s Oakland factory when he visited, and now the image of the rat stuck with me.

Life on Soylent

That first day, I drank Soylent for lunch and dinner. The first thing I noticed was that I felt instantly bloated, since on top of the two-liter liquid diet, I needed to drink extra water to prevent lightheadedness. My heart was racing, my stomach was making sloshing sound like a half-emptied Camelbak, and my eyes were wide open, maybe from the racing heart, or the absence of pizza-induced sluggishness, or the thought that all my classmates now think that I was eating blend-up goo made of people. 

But one thing bothered me particularly: I wasn’t entirely satisfied. Meals have always been something I look forward to throughout the day. Even if it’s just a crappy slice of pizza, I enjoy the chewing motion, the subtle merits and deficiencies of each ingredient —even bad food has character, and I simply enjoy the fact that I can have a personal moment with it.

The experience of eating is intimate, relaxing, joyful and even transcendental. Being simply aware that I can experience different flavors and textures and scents; it's a reminder that I’m simply alive. The vanilla and chocolate flavor of Soylent didn’t bother me, and I tried to savor the new dietary experience as indulgently as possible. But it was still just a bottleful of beige flavored gruel that went through my esophagus without emotion, three times a day. And ironically, the gruel stopped my hunger so fast and so efficiently that I needed to remind myself: "Your body desires food, not the desire for that desire."

Return to Glory

In the back of my mind, I knew that I was not really satisfied. Food was my lover for the longest time: she is vivacious, imaginative, seductive, yet I bid her farewell to be with a nonchalant partner that only wants to start a family for the sake of starting a family -- basic survival. After my two-week relationship with Soylent, I decided to return to my old lover’s arms.

Soylent was exciting for me at first with all its attractive possibilities, yet when I tried to commit to not committing to real food, Soylent lost all its glory.

The 7 pounds of powder took up more space than my kitchen could afford, but I didn't want to throw away what could literally feed the entire building. I wished there was a solid reason for me to throw it all out. “Please give me a trace of mold,” I talked to my cabinet, “or a courageous friend who can take these sacks and my conundrum away.”

Author’s Note:

I wrote this piece back in 2014 when Soylent first came out. I’m fully aware that Soylent has different effects on different people, who use it for different purposes and frequencies. The above is purely my personal experience and I hope the piece can be somewhat helpful and/or offer some perspective if you want to try it. I would love to hear about your experiences and stories.  Live Long and Have Fun!!