The Real Soylent Sickness

I have never tasted Soylent, the meal substitute dreamed up in Silicon Valley’s hacker-engineering culture and beloved by tech workers, but it hasn’t exactly received raves for flavor. Lizzie Widdicombe, writing about it in the magazine, two years ago, found a “yeasty, comforting blandness about it.” The tech team at Quartz came up with a list of descriptors including “wet cardboard,” “the aftertaste of Cheerios cereal,” and “not food.” Now that Soylent’s snack bars, the newest form for ingesting the food-replacement substance, have been voluntarily recalled by the company, after Gizmodo reported that the product made dozens of customers sick, that innocuous taste will likely be the least of its concerns.

The source of the Soylent Bar sickness is still unknown, and, while foodborne illness is nothing new to packaged foods, the incident highlights a deeper problem with Silicon Valley’s mission to radically alter the way we eat. Over the past few years, as money from the tech industry has found its way into all sorts of disruptive startups, the can-do engineering culture has set its sights on our daily bread.

Tech companies have promised substances to make life better for vegetarians, vegans, and those concerned about sustainability: eggless mayonnaise, fake meat, milk-free milk, and other lab-cultivated non-animal products that taste, smell, and even bleed like the real fleshy equivalents. And they’ve provided edible tools for the overworked drones of the tech industry: cubes of caffeine engineered to increase brainpower, without the coffee doldrums that follow, and, yes, Soylent, a liquid meal replacement for the nutrients you need to survive, without the inconvenience of eating actual food.

The result, fuelled by hundreds of millions in venture-capital investments, is a budding industry of food futurism that blends the utopianism of Silicon Valley’s culture with the quackery of Dr. Oz-approved “superfoods” and the idea that you can live forever if you just eat enough pomegranate seeds.

The problem with all this food-2.0 stuff isn’t that it sometimes tastes horrible but that it misses the mark on how our eating is evolving. The tech world approaches food from the perspective of engineering: a defined problem to be solved, with the right equations, formulas, compounds, and brainpower. Soylent was developed by its creator, Rob Rhinehart, to compress all the nutrition the human body needs to live into one single, easily digestible formula, like the twenty-first-century version of manna. But that is fundamentally the opposite of the way we increasingly want to eat in America and in much of the developed world.

When you look at the recent arc of food culture, the most significant food movement is the purposeful pushback against the postwar industrial food system, a system that was the food futurism of its day. This industry brought us preservatives, Wonder Bread, Tang, and microwavable frozen TV dinners. It lowered the price of food tremendously and increased convenience in innumerable ways, but it also made us fatter and sicker, and robbed our meals of their original flavors,replacing them with addictive but unhealthy substances. As Michael Moss has written, food scientists, particularly in the realm of snack foods, figured out how to combine salt, sugar, and fat in a way to provide “maximum bliss.” In his recent book “The Dorito Effect_,_” the journalist Mark Schatzker details the persistent effect that progress in food processing has had on our taste buds, as we amp up artificial flavors in an attempt regain the natural flavor we have stripped from our food with technology. He argues that returning food to the most basic, unaltered form is the best solution not just for taste but health.

Starting in the nineteen-seventies, the American food movement that began in the San Francisco Bay area and its international equivalents, such as Italy’s slow-food movement, saw the harm that this technologically centered food system did to taste, culture, health, and the environment. Instead, they proposed alternatives that were seen as archaic at the time, but which we increasingly accept as commonplace: organic produce and livestock, locally sourced products, and traditionally made food from whole ingredients.

This movement grew for various reasons, despite the fact that the food it promoted was more expensive to produce and consume, and vastly more difficult to grow and cook than the conventional, highly processed equivalent. It spoke to people’s social consciousness. It required less fertilizer and chemicals. It provided a healthier alternative.

It is easy to critique this as bourgeois, overpriced, and inaccessible to those who can’t afford a hobby of enlightened eating, but as the modern food movement has grown, so have the economies of scale that support it. You can now buy reasonably priced organic foods at many supermarkets across North America, and the number of farmers’ markets around the country has grown nearly tenfold in the past decade. Even the most heavily processed food brands, such as McDonald’s, pay lip service to better, less processed ingredients.

What Soylent and the latest batch of food-tech startups are aiming for takes us back to the days of astronaut ice cream. Remember that stuff? It was developed as part of the space program in the nineteen-sixties, and you bought it in the sort of science stores that were toy stores for nerds. It was sweet. It came in ice-cream flavors. But it wasn’t ice cream, it was a simulation of ice cream, and no one in their right mind would chose it over the cold, creamy stuff on a hot day. Not even an astronaut.

Silicon Valley’s failure to capture our appetites lies at the heart of what the technology industry misses about so many other things in this world. Though it may be possible to create technically feasible products for any aspect of our lives, those only succeed if they improve—rather than seek to replace—the human, highly tactile, and pleasurable world we want to live in. Most humans are happy to eat real food, and crave it in its most natural form. A strawberry picked at the height of summer. Fish pulled from a river and grilled over wood coals. Sourdough bread made from a twenty-year-old starter, and kneaded by hand. Wine grown on knobby vines, and aged in a dark cellar. Why would you disrupt that?

  • David Sax is the author of “Save the Deli,” “The Tastemakers,” and “The Revenge of Analog.”

    Read more »
