Soylent is terrible for humankind and you shouldn’t buy it
The issue isn’t one of flavor, it’s one of power
By now, you’ve seen the official announcement for “Soylent 2.0,” the characterless white ooze being promoted in Start-up world as the solution to everything from world hunger to the drudgery of grocery shopping.
It sounds kind of appealing, in a “Jetsons” kind of way: never worry about the turgid inconveniences of eating, ever again. Instead, reach into the cabinet and pull out a bottle of this Wonder Drink. You’ll never need to worry again about having to cook unless you want to. And hey, we’ll be able to solve the world’s hunger problems! Trust us!
It’s interesting to see the Soylent Bottle placed so strategically next to a beautiful bowl of strawberries, considering that the strawberries are part of a category (“food”) the founders of Soylent consider pointless and regressive.
The press releases online are delightful and shiny, optimistic and hopeful, with language designed to appeal to the health-conscious modern consumer:
When people today want food that is convenient and affordable they often resort to fast food or sugary snacks. We believe future generations won’t have to trade off between nutrition, convenience, and affordability. They’ll view fast food and sugary snacks as relics of the past — the same way many of us view smoking and other bygone unhealthy habits.
Gee, that sounds just lovely, doesn’t it? A world without the chronic ills delivered by fast food and sugary snacks. A world where everyone can afford nutrition. A world where the only choice is Soylent.
See, that *is* the ultimate goal of Soylent’s founders: a world in which Soylent has become the de facto source of nutrition for the majority of the world’s inhabitants. Soylent’s creator, Rob Rhinehart, isn’t just concerned about food access and helping people get healthy; he LITERALLY hates the burden of food.
In case you missed it, you should really check out his recent reads-like-satire “manifesto” — a kind of white privilege sociopathic screed that’s almost TOO full of insanity for just one or two quotes. Still, it’s difficult to beat these:
First, I never cook. I am all for self reliance but repeating the same labor over and over for the sake of existence is the realm of robots. I utilize soylent only at home and go out to eat when craving company or flavor. This eliminates a panoply of expensive tools and rotting ingredients I would need to spend an unconscionable amount of time sourcing, preparing, and cleaning….
I have not set foot in a grocery store in years. Nevermore will I bumble through endless confusing aisles like a pack-donkey searching for feed while the smell of rotting flesh fills my nostrils and fluorescent lights sear my eyeballs and sappy love songs torture my ears. Grocery shopping is a multisensory living nightmare. There are services that will make someone else do it for me but I cannot in good conscience force a fellow soul through this gauntlet.
Yeah, please stay out of the grocery stores, Rob; I really don’t want my kid around some freaky Renfield look-alike all squinting in pain and hissing about “rotting flesh” in front of the Boar’s Head display.
Rhinehart’s, shall we say, idiosyncracies aside, a lot of other people have already discussed why Soylent is bad from a nutritional and flavor perspective, and how hating food to this extent calls one’s very humanity into question. What I haven’t seen discussed is a problem implied in both the Soylent 2.0 ad and Rhinehart’s Gospel of Ick: Soylent is a food product made in a lab using a formula, from ingredients that you can’t source unless you’re privileged.
I mean, unless maybe your local CSA offers algae and isomaltulose in its weekly drop-boxes?
The real reason Soylent is awful and nobody should be giving money to these wackos is that they envision a future in which the power to feed the hungry many is in the hands of a wealthy few. I mean, sure, we can argue that this situation already exists, but ultimately, if I decide I want to take control of my own nutrition, I have that option. In Rhinehart’s future, though, your choice, unless you can afford otherwise, is SOYLENT. He describes this vision further in an even more disturbing post on his site (emphasis mine):
What is it that we have made? Quality without luxury. The world’s most useful and popular products are deceptively cheap and simple, deftly abstracting away volumes of complexity. This is the dream of Soylent, to be so useful it is taken for granted, like tap water or climate control….
The future of food is not the return to an agrarian society but the transcendence of it. In time Soylent will be synthesized directly from light, water, and air with designer microorganisms. Genetic engineering to enhance our microbiome, and eventually ourselves. I don’t know who was the first farmer, but I want to be the last. We will make food so cheap only the rich will cook.
And if you think that’s where it ends, oh, no. After eliminating our need for food (by placing it into the hands of the technocrats who control the “Soylent Synthesization Labs”), he’s set his sights on other basic substances (again, emphasis mine):
Good thing I still use water, for now.
So, what if you want something other than Soylent? Ha, Rhinehart seems to scoff, that’s like asking “what if you want something other than air?” Unless, of course, you’re “rich,” like he is.
And this attitude is why Soylent is terrible and we shouldn’t give money to the monsters who are trying to foist it on us. It might seem appealing to have a “healthy drink” instead of fast food, but what happens when your “healthy drink” is the only affordable option, and only the wealthy can afford fast food? Solving the world’s hunger problems seems like a great idea, too, but these guys are suggesting doing so by making the world’s hungry dependent upon their patented product.
It’s the ultimate in culinary colonialism; except for the upper classes, Soylent becomes the only answer to the question, “what should we eat?” Visiting Delhi and hungry for something on the street? Soylent. Taking a quick trip across town and want something fast and easy for dinner? Soylent. On government assistance and have to feed a hungry child? Soylent.
This is the future of a successful Soylent. This is the end-game that starts with a smoothie. This is the literal, self-stated goal of its creator.
It probably won’t happen, of course. There’s no real clear path to a total Soylent take-over. But, these days, you never can tell, and as food and water resources might possibly become more scarce, it’s easy to see how somebody, somewhere, might glom onto Soylent as a possible “easy solution.” It’s nice to have an “easy solution” to the problem of food access, because then we don’t have to consider the hard stuff, like global poverty, climate change, race, support for local farms and farmers, etc.
Hyperbolic? Maybe, but I’m not interested in taking any chances. So, do you want to contribute to this power-mad ideology and fund Rhinehart’s dreams of gustatory dictatorship? If so, pre-order now. Shipments begin October 15.
Jeremy Puma is co-editor of Invironment. Recommends are appreciated, but certainly not required.
