Soylent Solved All My Problems and Terrified Me

Six days on the anti-food.

To begin with, you should know I love food.

Oh, come on. Is there a more trite sentence, especially from a young(ish) person? It’s a Typical Millennial’s linguistic avatar, one who worships at the altar of pork belly, avocado and quinoa. We’re in a food-fetishistic era, which prompts both endless foodporn slideshows and backlash thinkpieces against our professed devotion to gluttony, our glib use of food as shorthand for identity.

Still — and I swear to you, this isn’t “cool girl” posturing — sometimes I think I love food a little bit more than most. For one thing, friends and dates always comment on my obvious, tablecloth-destroying enthusiasm for spaghetti and spring rolls. (Rude, but in some way slightly flattering.) In the past five years I’ve never, ever “forgotten” to eat. Not once. Generally the opposite is true; sometimes it feels like my life is intermission between anticipated meals. It’s either dedication to gastronomy or an undiagnosed blood sugar problem; I’m not really sure.

So when I first read about Soylent — the Silicon Valley-originating vegan, algae-oil and soy protein “food” bent on disrupting our everyday mindless eating — I found the idea fascinating, but repellant. The idea of life without food is, frankly, a bummer. I struggle to imagine my days without the little food highlights that break up the afternoons — a fried chicken drumstick at lunch, gelato from the century-old shop around the corner from my work, delivery sushi on weekends. A foodless (or food-minimized) world seems bleak, even a bit masochistic.

On the other hand, I spend more money than I care to admit on food and dining out, and I’m not one of those writers with a six-figure book deal. In no way do I have significant cash to burn. In terms of specifics, it’s July now, and according to my Mint account I spent $3100 on groceries and eating in restaurants over the past six months, or about $500 a month. That’s just over a quarter of my monthly take-home pay, which is absurd. (For context, this Lifehacker post suggests budgeting anywhere from 9–14 percent of your income on eating.)

There’s also the time factor. I spend a lot of time shopping for food, contemplating what I might like to eat next, floating dinner options with my partner, and making sure I have snacks on hand for days I plan to work out. At times I find it a little irritating. I must lose half an hour ruminating over lunch every day. Even if it’s back-burner cognition, I’m sure it taxes my energy levels. The thought of freeing up headspace for bigger decisions, like Steve Jobs with his ugly-ass turtlenecks, is tantalizing.

So in the interest of non-scientific anecdotal “research,” as well as the transparent hope of getting a good writing project out of it, I vow to embark on an informal test of the Soylent diet. Six days seems long enough to see what it’s like while avoiding any significant damage to my body. (I’m actually not sure about this, but I remind myself of all the movies I’ve seen about people in extreme food situations, like that super-depressing one about the prison hunger strike. I’ll be fine.) An order of 36 bottles of pre-mixed Soylent 2.0 sets me back a hundred bucks. That’s a week’s supply at about 2057 calories per day for $14, which includes an extra day and is generous for someone my age and build (31F, 5'3", petite), but I don’t want to end up hungry.

I realize other people have undertaken Soylent experiments, and for lengthier periods, but I have a few desired outcomes that make this project seem personally worthwhile. In addition to the aforementioned time and money issues, I also wonder if the deep mood swings I experience are related to my diet. I knew about “hangry” before it was an Urban Dictionary entry — sometimes I struggle when I travel because I have to eat every three or four hours or I can’t think straight. And I am prone to losing whole afternoons to mysterious brain fog, anxiety or dips into sullen moodiness.

I’ve never been able to make a connection to something specific I’m eating, but the controlled essence of Soylent seems like a good way to test things out. At the very least, I’ll have a weeklong reprieve from spending a shameful and unaffordable $27 on dumplings and pho for lunch because I’m having a shitty day.

What follows is, of course, my utterly anecdotal experience, sample size one, and in no way reflects anything you or any other sane person (a pointed reminder from the Soylent website: “Soylent should not replace every meal, but can replace any meal”) should do.

The day before my Soylent project begins, I run in a 5K race and eat a chocolate chip cookie, a sausage croissant and hash browns from Burger King, a bowl of ramen with an egg cracked in it, a smallish Caesar salad, shrimp scampi and a glass of Prosecco from my favorite Italian restaurant. It’s a pretty typical day of junky weekend eating for me. The next morning I wake up feeling refreshed from a rare 9-hour sleep and feel hungry. I look forward to getting to work, where I left the Soylent over the weekend.

When I unpack the first bottle, the package design strikes me as humorous and predictable. It’s an opaque white label, completely blank except for the tiny “Soylent” logo printed in black font near the bottom — the self-aggrandizing minimalism of contemporary design. The bottles are bigger than I expected; I was imagining an eight-ounce container. (I think I was picturing Ensure.) The liquid itself is an off-white color, sort of a medium viscosity, and it doesn’t smell bad, kind of yeasty.

How does it taste? Well … almost exactly like pancake batter you’ve forgotten to salt. It’s creamy without the animal-fat viscosity that most creamy things have. There’s a bland woody aftertaste familiar from soy milk. Its medium-thick texture makes it unclear to me whether you’re supposed to sip or chug it. Toward the end of the bottle, I get tired of drinking it, and down it more quickly.

I spend my Monday-morning meetings trying not to burp pancake batter.

Mid-morning of the first day I start to feel hungry, which is normal for me. (Standard breakfast: a Greek yogurt and fruit, which wears off by 11 or so.) I’ve been unusually focused all morning, but it’s not apparent whether I’m just having a good work day or if it’s the effect of the Soylent. At lunch I take a walk with my next bottle and get caught in subtropical New Orleans’ noon rainstorm, meaning I’ll spend the next five or six hours freezing in wet shoes and pants. Great.

Man, I think. A hot meal would hit the spot right now.

At 2 p.m., a dark chocolate Hershey bar on my desk from last week taunts me. About half an hour later, I catch myself spending a long time looking at a photo of eggs Benedict online. And I get hungry again. Generally, I’d ballpark that I eat about 800ish calories for lunch on top of what I’ve already eaten for breakfast, so with only two bottles of Soylent I’m down on calories for the day. I drink a third bottle (total: 1200 calories) mid-afternoon and have another one of those weird bursts of productivity. Usually my attention span is in rags by 4 p.m., but there I am, working on a project that I’ve been putting off and replying to emails.

Miracle food, or the result of getting enough sleep, for once? It’s too early to say.

The first night, something strange happens. I go to the movies. This in itself is not strange — I go to a lot of movies — but I don’t eat beforehand, because the idea of drinking the weirdo pancake shake in the indie movie theatre I go to all the time seems embarrassing. When the movie lets out, it’s about 9 p.m. and I’ve essentially skipped dinner. And I feel … fine. I’m somewhat hungry, but it’s not the trembling, scatterbrained hunger I usually experience, especially if I’ve missed a meal.

I drink Soylent when I get home, but without much appetite or enthusiasm. Total for the day: 4 bottles (1600 calories).

This seems like a good time to take a break and be perfectly honest about preconceived notions. I’m uncomfortable with the dystopian implications of this product, tongue-in-cheek name or not. I’m not sure people should necessarily aspire to avoid the distractions and interruptions that take us away from our work, even for the mere thirty or forty minutes it takes to eat lunch. There’s a niceness to the fact that our weak, human bodies force us to cease in our toils a few times a day to pause and break bread.

After my first day of Soylent, I’m noticing how much of my praise is based around getting work done and being more productive. My day feels more “optimized,” which is more or less the whole point of the Soylent origin story. But do I agree with that goal, philosophically? The 17-year-old anarchist who lives inside me resists the notion, the ever-questionable concept of conflating productivity with value.

It may sound silly or overwrought, but I think there are serious questions worth considering about the goal of being a more productive “worker,” especially given the tenuousness and precarity of many employment situations today. I have a job I like very much, but I’ve been through enough to know everything could change in an instant. In this economic environment, isn’t the willingness to be less than optimally productive, to take off for lunch or to hunt for a mid-day candy bar, a mini-rebellion worth standing up for?

(To say nothing of the fact that creative work requires downtime, subconscious pondering and digressions. It’s hard to get those when you’re parked at a desk with your Designated Food Supplement.)

I’m also creeped out by the awareness that this could replace food for many people, not because they’re creative-class workers like me or coders burning the midnight oil, but out of economic necessity. Soylent isn’t dramatically cheap now, but it’s new. Eventually it will become less expensive. I’m not so hot on the idea of the ability to purchase the most basic of commodities (food) becoming a signifier of affluence. To a certain extent I know this is already true — you can read about food deserts and processed food consumption by different income brackets until your head spins — but at least McNuggets approximate the comforts of food as we know it.

(I don’t know whether this makes McNuggets more defensible; I can see an argument for both sides.)

Around noon on Tuesday I start to feel ill. My nose runs and my stomach does slow, liquidy somersaults. I postpone “lunch” (already earning its own quotation marks) for a few hours and sit through a meeting. By the time the meeting lets out, I’m ready for a break. What I want is a smoothie from the nearby Smoothie King, but unfortunately undersalted pancake batter is still on the agenda. I take a moment to feel bereft about my imagined smoothie.

At night, I go for a thirty-minute run. I’m nervous about this — I lifted some light weights the first night, but haven’t done any cardio. As my feet start hitting the sidewalk, I feel stiff, but when I get loosened up I feel surprisingly … good. This is unexpected, since I haven’t eaten any solid food in two days. I don’t check a clock, but as I finish out the last blocks of my run I get the distinct impression that I’ve posted one of my best running times in a while.

My pseudo-cold from earlier in the day is gone, a blip in my Soylent adaptation.

Over the next few days I get used to my foodless world, though I also develop some weirdness and obsessions around food and restaurants. There’s a boiled seafood place near work that serves good crawfish and fried oysters, and I slow down when driving by one morning, like I’m cruising by an ex-boyfriend’s house with my headlights turned off. I edit a piece about a cooking competition and it feels like torture; I flip irritably through a recipe section in a magazine. I quit looking at Instagram, because pictures of friends’ various restaurant dinners are bothering me in a way I can’t define.

My teeth feel increasingly pointless. I floss, but in the absence of chewing it starts to feel like an existential exercise.

I cannot say I look forward to consuming Soylent. It is not, in any way, pleasurable. It is neutrality; it is the absence of pleasure. It is the very definition of palatable (I can put it in my mouth and swallow it without gagging, but given a choice, I would almost always select something else.) I take to downing the bottles in two or three big gulps, rather than sipping through them, meaning my meals take a mere few minutes out of my schedule.

All the same, toward the middle of the week, the problem that’s coalescing for me is not that Soylent doesn’t work. Rather, it works too well. Once it’s sufficiently inexpensive, it’s hard to imagine a convincing argument why you wouldn’t eat this all the time, rather than go through the expense and hassle of purchasing, preparing and storing capital-F Food. (I haven’t washed a dish in days.) I feel a little oppressed by the unrelenting logic of it, by how much sense it makes.

It reminds me of what I think of as the cellphone (or smartphone) problem. In the beginning, mass-market cellphones were a revolutionary thing. I’m just old enough to remember calling for rides home from the mall from a pay phone, and I remember the anxiety of waiting for the car to appear at the appointed hour (and the confusion when, for one reason or other, it did not arrive.) The cellphone eliminated unexplained lateness, missed connections, inadvertently stood-up dates, all the little unpredictabilities and snafus of everyday life at that time. When smartphones were developed, you got all that, plus the entirety of human knowledge accessible with the touch of a button, plus instant access to all your work files from anywhere, plus games, plus video chat with far-flung friends.

Why wouldn’t you want that? Again, the logic is insurmountable. Forgoing a smartphone, and its attendant conveniences, starts to seem needlessly obstinate. Why waste time being lost, when you can pull up Google Maps? Why ask someone for the number of a local cab company, when you can open Uber as soon as the jet hits the tarmac? Why go to the store, when you can have everything you could ever want auto-delivered from Amazon?

But this ruthless sense-making eliminates the messiness and irregularity that are part of what make life beautiful to me. I want a world with accidents and surprises, rich in frustrations and disappointments. I like the romance, at least sometimes, of being lost. I want the freedom to be irrational — by definition, not for any specific reason. To me, this is the antithesis of Soylent, which starts to seem (after a few days) scarily effective. It’s doing what it’s supposed to do and I find it unnerving. I’m not eating, at least what we usually think of as eating, and I’m working and running and going to yoga. My energy levels are high, and for what feels like the first time in my entire life, I’m not hungry at all.

Later in the week I read at an open mic that has notoriously good food. I try to avoid visual contact, but I can’t help but notice the lustrous green of the cucumber salad. There are vanilla creme cookies that look so perfect to me, they’re almost unreal, artifacts of a perfectly lit shot in a cooking magazine. I can’t tell whether they actually look that good or if it’s deprivation, and I don’t want to get close enough to check.

The reading goes fine, I go home, and I feel annoyed. I’m not hungry, but it’s clear: I want something to eat. I want a bowl of ice cream, or the cold shreds of a leftover rotisserie chicken (a favorite snack.) It’s fucking weird. I’m hungry in my mind, but not in my body.

We talk about emotional eating as something that’s always negative — listen to your body’s cues, they say. Don’t eat when you’re bored, angry, lonely or tired. But the thought I have that night is how much I resent not being able to eat in this context, when I’m burned out by a long day and want the familiarity and comfort of food. That’s as valid a cue as physical hunger, isn’t it? I feel the same way the next day, when realize I’m going to miss out on my lunchtime sojourn to one of the two nearby taco places. I am getting everything I need from Soylent, but something is absent.

Deep down, I know it’s silly to carp about not being able to eat when I’m not hungry, when there are plenty of people who don’t get enough to eat, period. But I don’t think the existence of hunger (on a global scale) delegitimizes my craving for the less physical aspects of nourishment; in fact, I think it underscores how essential that need is. And the craving illuminates how wrongheaded the ad for Soylent that keeps popping up on my Facebook seems to me.

The ad has a picture of a sheep — it’s a cute sheep, if you’re the type of person who finds farm animals cute — with the following tagline:

Every animal gets hungry, including Homo Sapiens. Sheep eat grass. You should eat Soylent.

I don’t want to eat like a sheep, mindlessly nibbling in the meadow like a lawnmower with feet. That misses the whole point of the experience of food, the minor delights of grabbing a cookie at a reading or finding leftover lo mein you forgot about in the fridge. If I asked, I imagine the creators of Soylent might argue that you’re not getting as much pleasure as you think out of that cookie or takeout container, and you might as well save your splurges for the important occasions like birthday cake or first dates. But should we really be asked to interrogate our pleasures in that way, like the Onion’s man who brings his lunch to cut down on small joys? What is ultimately more valuable: efficiency or enjoyment? What makes our lives more worth living?

The weekend arrives. Food from last week rots in my refrigerator. I spend the whole day Saturday doing things, trying to distract myself from the free-floating anxiety that accompanies unexpected spare time. I work on this piece; I walk to the bank, rather than driving; I go running in the hot summer sun. I kind of want to hang out with friends, but I thumb through my mental list of our usual activities and can’t think of anything that doesn’t involve eating (or sitting around drinking beers, which almost always leads to eating.)

At night I meet my partner to go to a comedy show. On the way we stop at Fry and Pie, a decadent bar kitchen with a menu that is mostly cheese fries putting on airs. He orders the pastrami fries, which bury fries and pastrami scraps under a mountain of melted Swiss cheese, garnished with Thousand Island and caraway seeds. When they arrive, he digs into the plate and the cheese stretches, like the lattice of some exotic, expensive fabric. I’m compelled, fascinated, a wide-eyed street urchin in a bad musical.

He offers me a bite. I hesitate — I’m not supposed to eat until tomorrow morning — then think, suddenly, fuck it. I grab a fork and tear a hunk of fries and cheese away from the mass. Then I put the fork in my mouth.

The luster of the cheese, coating the tongue with rich oiliness. The crisp green onions making a sound between my teeth. The dissonance of salty-crisp and mealy-neutral that is the hallmark of a good French fry, evoking hundreds or thousands of French fries consumed over a lifetime, picked out of humid and greasy paper bags, eaten off deli trays and friends’ plates.

Saliva gushes into my mouth. I can taste the smoky pastrami and the sugariness of the dressing, and it’s as though a quadrant of my brain that’s been ignored all week glitters with synaptic activity. I feel like I’ve just taken a hit of some incredibly good weed. Fry and Pie, which is a solid bet for Saturday-night bar food, has been elevated to transcendence. I want to award them a Michelin star.

Those two bites, mooched off my partner’s plate after six days on Soylent, are among the top five meals I’ve ever eaten.

It’s Sunday night now, and I’m sitting in bed, thinking about the complications of my Soylent experiment. In six days, I found no reason to question its effectiveness, and I often felt like it worked too well. There’s no doubt in my mind that we’ll see it, or something like it, rise to prominence in our lifetimes. It’s the sci-fi trope “meal in pill form” come to life — nutritionally complete, shelf stable, affordable, simple to prepare, humane. It is the answer for your (my) tiny apartment with a crappy kitchen with no countertops, for the parent with two jobs with no time to cook dinner for her kids, for the restaurant employee who has to eat over a trash can between tables. It can feed the masses in a way our current system of food production, which is already buckling under the weight of monoculture, factory farming and an exploding population, never will.

Yes, it does everything it’s supposed to, and it’s even cheaper than I anticipated, as I ended up drinking four bottles a day and not five. (Cost per day: about $11.) I avoided impulsive spending on green juice and ice cream cones, felt more productive during the week, didn’t suffer the hunger pangs and irritability that so commonly dog me throughout the day (I should see a doctor about that), provided a more nutritionally balanced and less junk-food-centric diet than I enjoy, and gave me a new appreciation for food when I returned to it, those two mind-blowing bites of cheese fries that should be a special-occasion splurge but that I eat every other weekend or so.

But I still feel deeply uneasy about the whole thing. The vague theoretical objections I had when I started this project were vindicated by a disquieting realization: this won’t be that hard to get used to. Science gives us so much, including the ability to engineer a product that quells our hunger in a perfectly controlled way. Someday you’ll be able to get Soylent, or a Soylent-like product, that’s tailored to your personal needs, whether you have a kidney disorder or are pregnant or elderly.

And we’ll learn to expect less, in our new lives full of exquisitely engineered foodstuffs tinkered with by our brightest minds. We’ll have a new tool to help us fulfill the obligations of an ever-more demanding economy, a bulwark against the vulnerability of malnourishment or physical or spiritual hunger. Eating will join cooking as a lost art. We won’t want things to be that way, of course, but eventually it will “just make sense.” It’ll start to seem normal, the same way it’s normal now to have a side hustle because most jobs don’t pay enough anymore, or the way everyone knows someone who’s been through company layoffs.

For my first real meal after Soylent, I go to Stein’s, the New York-style deli marooned in the middle of Magazine Street. There’s nothing like a Stein’s bagel, which has the salty crust and dense, toothsome grain no pillowy supermarket bagel can match. Those bagels, topped with lox, onions, capers and cream cheese, are among my favorite things to eat in this world. I have contemplated elevating them to proverbial “last meal” status.

My food arrives, and I admire it for a moment, picking a slice of tomato off the top of the sandwich and feeling the tart juices pop against my tongue. As I eat, tasting the salmon — the ocean become flesh, somehow, sheared off in velvety ribbons— I watch the young tattooed people coming in and out, kissing each other hello, receiving takeout containers of corned beef sandwiches and matzo ball soup over the deli counter. And for a moment I feel like I’m already part of the past, in an ordinary Sunday-morning scene that will someday seem as romantically wasteful and decadent as people smoking in hospital waiting rooms, or driving around in giant finned cars without seatbelts.

Soylent is coming. Gather ye bagels while ye may.