Gear & Gadgets / Product News & Reviews



Lee Hutchinson

In our last episode...

Soylent Day 2 ended with me hauling my overstuffed Soylent-filled carcass out for a 5k run. The run actually didn't end all that badly—not great, but not awful either. The Gulf Coast heat and humidity are keeping my per-mile splits in what I call the "Summer Twelves," where they tend to drop every single year. Running on Soylent didn't do anything to improve my times, but it didn't lower them any. I had some light stomach cramping during the run, similar to how I feel if I run too soon after eating a particularly big meal.

The first sip of ice-cold post-run water splashed cool in my stomach—a surprisingly empty stomach, given how heavy I still felt. As I swallowed, it still felt like there was a bit of Soylent grit in my throat, and that damned green pitcher still brooded when I replaced the water jug in the fridge. I gave it the finger, then went to shower.

Dusk pulled its cloak over the world and I drank more Soylent. My wife and I watched another episode of The Wire. She had dinner before she got home from work, though I wouldn't have been tempted by her food. I wasn't in a place right then where food really seemed to matter. I kissed her and she turned her face away, saying that she loves me but that I tasted really strange. I smiled and nodded. It's the Soylent. She kissed my forehead instead and took her cold medicine and Kleenex boxes to retire to the guest bedroom again.

I sat on the couch and read for a while. It was a relief to not have to eat any more. The minutes stretched out, and I lost myself in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, which I have read many times before. It is a series that rewards re-reading; a rich and dense story told by an unreliable narrator who possesses an eidetic memory—a quality which, ironically enough, is the source of much of the unreliability.

Trodding the well-worn paths of memory and reconsidering riddles in the plot that I've considered hundreds of times over the years was comforting, soothing. I felt better than I'd felt at any point in the past 48 hours. Then, a bit before midnight, I got a pair of e-mails from two of the folks at Soylent, one from founder Rob Rhinehart and one from customer service vice president Julio Miles. "We encourage Soylent beta testers to decide how much Soylent they require in a day," he said. Rhinehart had a similar message. They both tell me that I don't have to actually eat the entire bag of Soylent.

As I read this, a weight fell from my shoulders. Tomorrow suddenly looked a lot brighter.

Day 3, 09:00—The breakfast of champions

My morning coffee is incredible, like it came straight from Gale Boetticher's lab. It smells indescribably good and tastes like rich magic. It can't be the coffee itself—it's the same Keurig-brewed Green Mountain "Sumatran Reserve" I've been drinking for years. Must be the Soylent. Finally, on Day 3, I'm beginning to taste things more.

It's surprising how much mental attitude and outlook affects physical things like appetite. Now that the weight of actually chomping through the entire Soylent ration in one day is lifted, I feel actually pretty damn good—I'm looking forward to being able to only down the quantities I want, and that's cleared off a whole bunch of mental table-space I can use to focus on actually getting some stuff written today.

A quick Twitter poll revealed that you guys want to see me eat purple Soylent next; this requires quite a bit of fiddling with red and blue food coloring. The results are actually more plum-hued—sort of purple tinged with Soylent's natural earthy color. I once again add vanilla, sticking with the ratio from yesterday, which tasted quite fine.

Enlarge / Hot blender action. Still trying to dial the color in.
Lee Hutchinson

I'm getting the mixing process down pretty well, and I'm satisfied with the results out of the blender, but the Soylent guys are sending me a mixing pitcher that ought to let me remove the mighty Blendtec from the picture entirely, which ought to change my creation and consumption picture for the better.

Soylent purple tastes a lot like Soylent green—an agreeably faint note of vanilla over chalk. Truly, the flavor isn't the thing that's keeping me from loving Soylent—it's the riverbed silt texture.

My portion for breakfast fills the coffee cup, and I actually finish it without realizing—I lift my cup to sip and it's gone. I feel fine, which lifts my spirits. After thirty minutes, my gut remains placid and agreeable.

Enlarge / I'm Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite drink on the Citadel.
Lee Hutchinson

Poop log, Day 3 (HA HA SEE WHAT I DID THERE)

Morning bathroom times are much like yesterday's. Aside from the initial attack of gas that would have brought down an army of UN inspectors if my guts were a nation-state, Soylent hasn't done anything terrible to my insides. I did not explode like a suicide poop bomber yesterday, and I don't today either.

Well, OK, there is one major difference in today's morning toilet excursion. Um. How best to describe this? Okay, so, parents, have you ever given your kids a cake with, like, Oscar the Grouch or Godzilla on it? You know, something with a lot of green food coloring mixed in? Well, that Soylent from yesterday had a lot of green food coloring mixed in.

I will never be able to un-see what I beheld this morning. If I'm ever facing down Roy Batty on a future-noir rainy Los Angeles tenement rooftop and he tries to bust out his "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe" speech, I will put up my hand, fix his stark blue gaze with my own, and teach him what it truly means to stand naked in awe and terror before the vast and unknowable depths of the universe.

Enlarge / Yo, Roy, I'm really happy about them C-beams in the dark and Imma let you finish, but YOU CANNOT COMPREHEND THE HULK-HUED FECAL HORRORS I HAVE WITNESSED.
Warner Bros.

Ahem. Maybe we should move on.

What’s in the bag?

Rhinehart is keeping the exact formula for Soylent under wraps—and plus, it's continually evolving as they near production. However, the ingredients list is common knowledge. Here's the instructional PDF that arrived with my Soylent sample, showing what exactly is inside those shiny plastic pouches:

v0.89 Ingredients

  • Maltodextrin (carbs)
  • Oat Powder (carbs, fiber, protein, fat) Rice Protein
  • Pea Protein
  • Grapeseed Oil (fat)
  • Potassium Gluconate
  • Salt (sodium)
  • Magnesium Gluconate
  • Monosodium Phosphate
  • Calcium Carbonate Methylsulfonylmethane (Sulfur) Creatine
  • Powdered Soy Lecithin
  • Choline Bitartrate
  • Ferrous Gluconate (Iron)
  • Vitamin mix

Those are all of the major ingredients (the grapeseed oil isn't actually in the pouch—as mentioned, it comes in a separate little vial), plus the separate fish oil capsules. Now, the specific quantities of each component aren't listed, but that's only a temporary thing. Once the Soylent formula is totally finalized and in production, Rhinehart will be making it publicly available. Soylent will be libre (though not, most assuredly, gratis).

Day 3, 11:30—Eating when hungry is awesome

A standard-sized breakfast and no re-Soylenting at 10am leads to actual for-real hunger around my usual lunch time. As silly as it may sound, hunger can be a beautiful thing. Not to make light of people starving, but normal first-world hunger and the anticipation of satiation feels good, especially after two days of eating more than I wanted to eat.

I grab my Purple Drank and pour a healthy serving, because, hey, I'm hungry! The taste is met not with rebellion, as it has been in previous days. Instead there's a much more normal-feeling rush of let's-get-this-eating-party-started saliva and a pleasurable mini-endorphin surge. I want food! I want Soylent! Put it in my face!

It's such an odd feeling to be excited about drinking the stuff, and the serving goes pretty quickly—I'm half-done before I sit back down at the computer to resume work. The rest of the glass only takes me another minute or so to knock back. Thirty minutes later, my gut starts up with a much more subdued version of its standard Soylent rumblings. There's a bit of gas, but I am no longer a danger to myself and others. I fall quickly back into the work routine.

Day 3, 14:30—Hunger! Blessed hunger!

I feel good. I'm not developing superpowers or anything—not yet, at least, though there's always hope—but I don't feel anything even remotely like the lethargy and crappiness of yesterday. The fogginess of last night is totally gone, and I feel a lot more like myself. I feel centered.

The mug-sized servings of Soylent I've been attacking seem to be providing satiety for two to three hours, and I start to feel noticeably hungry again in the mid-afternoon. It's a familiar hunger too, since I usually munch on something at around this time. I've been feeling some more extended gut rumblings, but it's nowhere near yesterday.

Another cup of Soylent down the hatch, and it's back to work, pranking coworkers by instant messaging them with toxic unicode strings, which let me tell you, is truly hilarious.

Day 3, 17:30—Consumption

As the work day closes and I log out of the Ars IRC channel, I proceed happily to the kitchen and pour another small glass of Soylent. Today has, at least so far, been a smashing success. I feel quite good, and I estimate that I'm about 40 percent done with the pitcher of Soylent.

I've also been drinking more water today in an effort to ensure the mail keeps on moving, so to speak. Two full liters of Soylent brings with it plenty of water, and for the past two days I've only had the occasional small glass of water to drink. Today, though, with the reduced amount of Soylent I'm drinking, I want to make sure I'm also drinking enough fluid for my much-scrutinized bowels to be able to do their job effectively.

At this level of Soylent intake, figuring on two more servings for the evening, a single bag will last me well into tomorrow. This is a good sign and puts me on roughly the same level as Soylent VP Julio Miles, who goes through about one bag per 1.5 days. It's much more in line with my calorie profile, and it doesn't make me feel as if I myself am a giant bag filled to bursting with Soylent.

Day 3, 19:00—Showtime

But the pitcher almost certainly won't last into tomorrow, because I won't be drinking it myself. I'm having my buddies Matt and Steve over, and we're going to all get our Soylent on together. I've known Matt and Steve since grade school, and they are two of my closest friends. In an hour, I'm going to test the limits of two multi-decade friendships: we're going to make Matt drink some Soylent, and Steve is going to film it and put it on the Internet.

This deserves a bit of clarification, though, because Soylent is not in any way vile or awful. Today has proven to me that drinking it is actually great—as long as you're not overstuffing yourself. I think I've done a good enough job describing the taste and texture; chalkiness aside, it's a perfectly palatable blank canvas, and with a bit of tweaking it can probably be made to taste pretty much like whatever you want. However, my buddy Matt—who is no doubt reading this—is a notoriously picky eater. We used to poke him about it all the time when we were in junior high and high school, way back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and people ate Brontosaurus Burgers (because I'm old). Matt would always order his Brontosaurus Burger exactly the same way: "Mustard, ketchup, pickles, no cheese. I'm allergic to cheese. If you give me cheese, I'll throw up on the counter in front of you." I can hear those words echoing eternally in my ears.

He's got a relatively short list of foods he'll happily eat and, thankfully, an ever-growing list of foods that he tolerates, thanks to a loving and patient wife (who is far nicer to him than he probably deserves). However, Soylent is so far outside of Matt's normal comfort zone that it might as well be on Mars. He's gamely volunteered to try the stuff though, because he's got that same weird combination of showmanship and masochism that makes me do things like, well, like this story.

You guys already know Steve—or, at least, you probably have seen his work. He's been my erstwhile photographer and videographer on just about everything I've written for Ars that's required actual skill to document. With a bit of luck, I'll also be able to coax him out from behind the camera to hoist a frosty mug of Soylent with us.

I'm risking Matt puking all over my clean countertop, and I'm doing it all for you, Internet. Stay tuned for tomorrow's post with the video.

Expand full story

You must to comment.