Soylent Squared launched last week, offering another meal replacement option for those seeking efficient nutrition. In this excerpt from Hacking Life: Systematized Living and Its Discontents by Joseph M. Reagle, Jr., we revisit the development of Soylent and explore its appeal in the life hacking movement. This book is available in hardback or as an open access ebook on the Pubpub platform.
Rob Rhinehart applies the hacker ethos to every domain of his life. He’s a minimalist and appreciates challenges. Rhinehart has run his home on a single 100-watt solar panel and once undertook the challenge of using no more than four liters of water a day. He calculates that instead of washing dirty clothing, it is more efficient and green to regularly donate it to charity and order custom clothing from China — a calculation reminiscent of Tynan throwing away pennies and nickels. And when it comes to eating, he believes he can engineer a nutritious meal replacement.
In a 2013 post entitled “How I Stopped Eating Food,” the software engineer wrote of the benefits of his thirty-day experiment with an early version of Soylent, a powdered shake. Rhinehart studied textbooks and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) publications and ordered constituent nutrients online. As he blogged about it, others commented and made suggestions. He offered free batches of his mix to those who would send him blood work: “Bonus points for getting a psych evaluation before and after. The brain is an organ.”
Rhinehart’s own results were extraordinary. He reported that he had healthier skin, whiter teeth, and thicker hair, and his dandruff was gone. He felt like the Six Million Dollar Man: his physique had improved, his stamina had increased, and his mental performance was sharper than ever. His awareness was elevated, and he found music more enjoyable. Rhinehart marveled, “I notice beauty and art around me that I never did before.” In terms of his “quantified diet,” his cravings and tastes finally matched his needs; he had “full visibility and control” over what was going in to his body.”
I was aware of Soylent from Rhinehart’s blog from early on but was skeptical because of all of these purported benefits. He sounded like a hightech quacksalver with a less-than-palatable elixir. Throughout much of its history, from version 1.0 in early 2014 through version 1.7 in late 2016, Soylent users complained of gastric distress and flatulence. (“Version 2.0” is the ready-to-drink version launched in 2015.)
As the product matured, Rhinehart discontinued the health claims and shifted focus. In 2015, he declared that Soylent was “perhaps the most ecologically efficient food ever created.” Elixir was out, and efficient food was in. If it didn’t improve health, it would at least provide convenient nutrition for a low cost. Yet early in 2017, his blog was replaced by an enigmatic quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable.” That is, anything we might ask has an answer, if we have sufficient perseverance. I suspect he took down his website at the behest of Soylent’s investors and lawyers. Apparently, taking down his website was not enough. Later in 2017, Rhinehart stepped down as Soylent’s CEO — taking instead the title of Executive Chairman. Soylent enthusiasts feared investors wanted Soylent as a high-end niche product rather than a universal solution to nutrition.
In any case, and independent of work on this book, I know a number of folks who have used meal replacements for breakfast or lunch. And as with the dominance of quantification, the privileging of experience over expertise, and the allure of high-tech gadgets, their reasons for consuming Soylent speak to their personality and the character of the digital age.
I met Ron A. at a park where our dogs played together. From our brief conversations, I knew he was a software engineer, and he knew that I had written a book about Wikipedia. We were fellow geeks. By the way he dressed, I also suspected he would be a good source for this book. Ron often wore a colored T-shirt with the day of the week printed on it. At midweek he wore a green “Wednesday” T-shirt; on the next day he wore a “Thursday” T-shirt in navy blue. When I interviewed him, he said the shirts were part of an effort to “make a ‘uniform’ of simple repeatable things to wear in order to reduce daily routine cognitive load.” Ron Googled such clothing to see whether it existed, and, indeed, shirts of this type could be had at the site Minimalist Tees — now defunct. Many other geeks and designers have done something similar, including Steve Jobs with his blue jeans and black turtlenecks.
A complement to the uncertainty of the digital age is our extraordinary amount of choice: we are invited to rate, like, click, and swipe every facet of life. Although this sounds wonderful, paradoxically, choice can be anxiety provoking as we waste time deciding what to choose and then second-guessing ourselves. Some look to celebrities for direction. Thousands believe that if something is sold on Gwyneth Paltrow’s goop.com it must work, including “Wearable Stickers that Promote Healing (Really!)” Although hackers appreciate choice and complexity in specific domains, they seek to simplify everywhere else. Gear lists and minimalism are two such approaches to simplifying their relationship to stuff: prioritize what is valuable and discard everything else. As minimalism is to stuff, meal substitutes are to nutrition.
Soylent allows Ron to simplify: to save on time (shopping, cooking, and cleaning), money (it is an inexpensive source of nutrients), and waste (it can keep for weeks). He consumes it for lunch, except when he goes out with coworkers.
I asked Ron what prompted him to try Soylent, and he explained it was related to his interest in bitcoin, the online crypto-currency. Ron followed Rhinehart’s early experiments and noted that “as a fellow software engineer,” he related to Rhinehart’s approach to nutrition. When Rhinehart announced he would accept bitcoins in the crowdfunding of a salable product, Ron pitched in.
Lee Hutchinson, senior editor at Ars Technica, writes that Soylent divides people into those who are repulsed by the idea and those “desperate to receive their orders.” The latter turn to Soylent because they are “geek types” for whom cooking is a “fuzzy” analog process, which prompts anxiety. (Baking, in contrast, is thought to be more deterministic.) Also, it helps people with unhealthy relationships to food.
Soylent is food methadone. It’s not quite the magic food pill from science fiction, but it does have a lot of that pill’s qualities. It’s satiating without being delicious; eating it won’t provide the endorphin rush that overeaters experience when gorging; and it’s easy to prepare. It’s a thing you can replace snacks or some meals with (or even all meals, if you want), without having to fight urges. Or, to put it another way — when you’re used to eating chicken nuggets and hot dogs exclusively, the effort that might go into either making a healthy salad or going to a restaurant and ordering one might seem overwhelming next to just eating some more nuggets or just ordering the hot dog. Soylent, then, can be just a thing that fuels your body without triggering anxiety or more depression about eating the wrong thing.
It seems paradoxical that some Soylent users are delving into the minutiae of nutrition and blood work, whereas others choose Soylent for its simplicity. The very idea of choosing simplicity seems paradoxical. But for hackers, not so much.
Hackers are happy to invest time and energy up front if they end up with a system to use in the future. As Tynan wrote about the benefits of automation: “I love one-time investments that pay off over the very long term. The reason I call my books Superhuman is because you can often achieve results that look superhuman just by setting up lots of easy systems. … And you get to keep those benefits for a long time with little or no maintenance.”
Also, life hackers appreciate abstraction and modularity, which they use to master complex systems. Imagine that in a software application I need to sort a list of names. Without caring about how it works, I can pass my names to the sort() function, and it returns a sorted list. In this way, sorting is modularized: I don’t need to know the details. Should I need to get into the details and implement my own version, I can, but otherwise I defer to sort(). When Rhinehart wrote that he had “full visibility and control,” this meant that he and other enthusiasts could engineer the Soylent formula, but most users need not bother. Because the process is transparent, they can join the conversation should they need to, but once they’ve done their initial investigations, they can save themselves the cognitive load of preparing a meal.
In short, hackers are used to working with complex systems and many choices, but they set good defaults at the start so they can focus on what most interests them. As Colin Wright wrote about minimalism: “It’s cutting out the things you don’t care about — that you don’t need — so you can invest more of yourself in the stuff you’re passionate about.” As it was with software and stuff, so it is now with food.
Excerpted from Hacking Life: Systematized Living and Its Discontents by Joseph M. Reagle, Jr (The MIT Press, 2019).
Read the open access version of this book now on the Pubpub platform.
