You Don't Need Real Food

Soylent raises $800,000 for food replacement product

https://campaign.soylent.me/soylent-free-your-body

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/soylent-raises-800000-for-food-repla...

I love food. I enjoy buying it, cooking it, growing it, and, best of all, eating it. So when I first heard ofSoylent, a food replacement product, I imagined living a life in which dinner meant combining a white powder with water. A dystopia for me is an apparent utopia for the 6,000-plus people who gave nearly $800,000 to successfully fund Soylent’s crowdfunding campaign.

The idea of living without food isn’t just now becoming popular (though I’ve been seeing plenty ofnews stories on the subject recently). Forty years ago the science fiction movie Soylent Green, from which the product is undoubtedly named, explored a world in which everyone lives on highly processed wafers. (As far as we can tell Soylent is not people.)

The fact that one product that claims to give you all the nutrition you could ever need is becoming a reality is disturbing to me, but Soylent gives some convincing reasons why it could be a good thing. Their main argument is that it takes less time and effort to get the nutrition you need. For those of you who don’t have a work-life balance, this could come in handy. Plus, the creators argue, you could save money on food costs. And then they make the environmental case: it doesn’t go bad for years, and would help cut down food waste and reduce food transportation costs. Here are the inventors making their case:

And here’s what’s in it “loosely based off the recommendations of the FDA.”

So what’s it like to live exclusively on Soylent? The Register tried it for a week. Here’s their take:

Though our week with Soylent has lessened our initial crushing cynicism, we’ll wait for the results of sustained academic study before we pass judgement on it as an actual meal replacement. On the other hand, we’ve just spent a week on it and didn’t lose weight, didn’t go crackers, and haven’t felt hungry (though we did lust after typical food).

Soylent is definitely on to something here. A big part of the food industry is aimed at getting people to eat food more efficiently with highly processed on-the-go items that aren’t all that good or good for us. So it helps me to think of Soylent not as a food replacement but a supplement, and replacement for those fast food items. And for people forced on to a liquid diet for medical reasons or otherwise, this could be extremely useful. Maybe there is a place for Soylent in our food future, alongside the 3D printed pizza, but not instead of it.

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Silicon Valley is Hacking Your Food

This 24-year-old founder thinks humans can live healthier by just not eating. And that's not the most audacious--or most bizarre--part of his vision.

Courtesy Company

 

Software isn't eating your lunch…not just yet. But you've probably heard that a 24-year-old programmer who went through Y Combinator, Paul Graham's prestigious start-up bootcamp, is trying to prove humans don't need traditional food--you know, that texture-rich, tasty solid-form stuff that was or is a living organism--to survive.

Instead, he's proposing, based on his own rigorous and fairly risky self-assessment, that ingesting an inexpensive, precise mix of all essential nutrients in the form of powder mixed with water, can be sustainable. It might be cheaper and easier to produce than food, too--and it might actually make humans healthier.

His name is Rob Rhinehart, and he's co-founder of Soylent, the Oakland-based company that makes a powdered food product of the same name. (If you're getting creeped out thinking about the 1973 film Soylent Green, with Charlton Heston, hold that thought a moment. I asked Rhinehart about it in an interview, notes from which follow.)

Rhinehart's YC days last summer were spent building an entirely different company. Graham reportedly called it the "biggest pivot in YC history" when Rhinehart, whose start-up team was working around the clock to build inexpensive wireless networks for developing countries, decided to instead focus on finding a more efficient way to stay nourished. Here's how Rhinehart told me it happened: 

We did demo day after YC that summer and we met with a bunch of investors, and they all said it was just too expensive to do this sort of infrastructure sort of thing. It just didn't get very far. I sort of plotted out our runway. We had a certain amount of money, and you include all of your expenses, and see how long that's going to last you to live. This is our rent, and this is our food. And I thought, this is interesting. What if I didn't need food to live? That would increase our runway.

So he embarked on research on essential nutrients for humans, purchased FDA-approved versions of each, and consulted the National Institute for Medicine for daily recommended doses of each. Then he decided to become his own guinea pig, ingesting solely this powder concoction composed largely of carbs, amino acids, fiber, and vitamins. 

"I didn't really expect it to work for very long. The first couple days, I was like, 'well, I'm still alive,'" he says. "It was sort of like I was pushing off shore. After three days or so, it was strange realizing there was no food in my system and I was subsisting entirely on chemicals. But I felt fantastic. I felt euphoric. I felt full of energy."

Rhinehart had his blood tested, half-anticipating a deficiency in some nutrient, but found none. He's still in testing phase, going on five months on Soylent, with very occasional solid meals. He's launched Soylent into a full-blown company with a crowdfunding round, and a few dozen new guinea pigs--some of whom are also testing their blood for signs of trouble, and posting results online. Plenty of them are Silicon Valley types. Some are journalists.   

It was at the office of YC partner Garry Tan that I first encountered Rhinehart's concoction. Tan is enthusiastic about it--he ordered an early supply through Soylent's crowdfunding campaign. So has Alexis Ohanian, YC's "ambassador to the east" who recently posted an Instagram photo of himself drinking the concoction, with the note, "Cheers to you, future of food!" (although perhaps what's most notable here is his less-than-enthusiastic expression).

To be clear, Rhinehart isn't proposing a counterargument to food-history author Michael Pollan's rough dietary guideline: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." He says there's nothing wrong with enjoying a meal, you know, per se. It's just not always an efficient use of time or energy, which irked his engineering-school sensibilities.

"I really enjoy working, I just don't like doing repetitive things or redundant things. I don't like going to the grocery store for the same things and waiting in line and cooking and cleaning over and over. It was really frustrating for me," he says.

He told Vice he's sticking with his largely liquid diet--at least for now: "Soylent is definitely a permanent part of my diet. Right now I only eat one or two conventional meals a week, but if I had any money or a girlfriend, I would probably eat out more often. I'm quite happy with my bachelor chow. I don't miss the rotary telephone, and I don't miss food."

He says he has a lengthy list of things he doesn't miss, including grocery shopping, dishes, arguments with his roommates about dishes, tedious conversations about the merits of veganism and gluten-free diets (Soylent is both), napkins, crumbs on his laptop, and morning breath. 

http://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/soylent-start-up-hacking-food.html

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