Soylent 2.0 Review
Soylent 2.0 is a moderately viscous, beige-colored Newtonian fluid conduit for caloric input. Simply put, this product will provide you with the biochemical components necessary for human life — saccharides, lipids, proteins, miscellaneous vitamins and minerals — in a form slightly less repulsive than its sci-fi inspirations, the most famous one appearing in The Matrix. Each serving is 400 kcal — Calories with a capital C for Americans — although it is disappointing that the tolerances for calorie counts are not provided.
This product comes in a white plastic bottle covered in smooth plastic film. The entire apparatus is recyclable, which aligns with other Silicon Valley-friendly features in this product, like vegan certification, an algae-based lipid formula, and an insistence that GMO status and level of food processing don’t matter as long as the final product is healthy — in other words, that the ends justify the means.
Soylent 2.0 smells like Lucky Charms and tastes like original Cheerios ground up and mixed with low-fat milk. One cannot help but wonder whether the resulting nostalgia trip was an intended feature or merely a bug that the developers never bothered to fix. Drinking one serving along with two glasses of cool water will change the state of one’s digestive system from “hungry” to “not hungry” — but not “full.” This, however, makes sense considering that Soylent 2.0 is not a meal replacement. Humans beings in Western cultures traditionally eat three meals per day, whereas one is expected to consume five servings of Soylent 2.0 per day, with each serving being slightly smaller than a traditional meal. A quick perusal through bodybuilding meal plans confirms that eating five or six meals per day is in fact optimal for human health, which is likely why the developers of Soylent 2.0 chose that pace of calorie delivery.
This product is the natural conclusion of optimization in caloric input. It ships directly to consumers’ doorsteps, disrupting the restaurant industry, the grocery industry, the delivery food industry, and the dating industry. The product website claims that Soylent 2.0 was invented “after recognizing the disproportionate amount of time and money [the developers] spent creating nutritionally complete meals,” but upon reflection, it appears that the developers considered any daily investment in food above five minutes, twelve dollars, and ten cents excessive.
As a result of this efficiency-focused mentality, this product is ideal for anyone who is too busy or impatient to care about food. It can be consumed in almost no time, requires no effort to preserve it, and is close enough to tasteless that constant consumption will likely not trigger gag reflexes (much like hookups on Tinder). As a result, near-total subsistence on Soylent is possible and in certain cases potentially ideal. One can imagine a (white, male) Stanford CS grad in San Francisco chugging a Soylent 2.0 on the fifteen-minute walk to his office, smug in his accomplishment of — within 6.5 minutes — waking up from the futon in the studio apartment he shares with 2 coworkers; showering, shaving, and brushing his teeth simultaneously; putting on set 4/7 of jeans, T-shirt, and hoody; and sauntering out of the door. He remembers a time and set of conditions when preparing real food required as little time and effort as Soylent 2.0, but his mother had long ago forced him out of the house, reasoning (improperly) that someone with a six-figure salary should be mature enough to take care of themselves.
Looking into the future, Soylent 2.0 would be an ideal means of feeding “people in third-world conditions,” a euphemism for poor people as used by people who do not even know poverty second-hand. Notionally, this makes sense. Soylent makes nutrition simpler (for the end user), cheaper, and more efficient, in the same way that {Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, Facebook Free Basics} makes {shopping, transportation, housing, Internet in “third-world conditions”} simpler (again, for the end user), cheaper, and more efficient.
This potential for great contributions to the health of the human species feeds into an optimism beaming from everything related to Soylent 2.0 — simply look at the white-on-white aesthetic of the website; the company tagline, “Free your body;” or the announcement video featuring upbeat music, a friendly-sounding voiceover touting the dawn of an era of abundance, and lots of hip white Californians (and one black woman in an afro) smiling. This optimism conveniently ignores the ethical issues of letting number-obsessed corporations run almost entirely by rich and nerdy white men barge into completely different cultures, show everyone in those cultures a “better” way to live life, crush all competitors and alternative lifestyles, and (by coincidence) get rich selling the components of their imported lifestyle. But this is a moot point, because intuition suggests that making products cheaper and more abundant makes people’s lives quantifiably better in all circumstances.
The name “Soylent” was lifted from a 1966 sci-fi novel, Make Room! Make Room!, about a world choked by overpopulation. Here, Soylent was a mixture of soy and lentil — hence the name — used as a substitute for meat. Like the product sold today, this proto-soylent was a means of making food cheaper and more resource-efficient. However, this original soylent was a product of a world that Malthusian economics had turned into a dystopia of authoritarianism, overcrowding, and shortages of food and water, which provides a stark contrast to the optimism of the product sold today under the same name.
But in that respect, Soylent 2.0 is a perfect representation of Silicon Valley. The dystopia of Make Room! Make Room! exists in parts of the world today — those “third-world conditions” again — albeit those horrors are products of imperialism, not Malthus. To Silicon Valley, however, those places need nothing more than Silicon Valley products to become utopian paradises. And when those “third-world” people reject the premise that foreign, self-interested companies make life objectively better, the reaction from the tech industry proves the general theorem implied by the peculiar nomenclature of Soylent:
