This story is over 5 years old

Life After Food


by Brian Merchant and VICE Staff
Dec 24 2013, 12:00am

It was my second day on Soylent and my stomach felt like a coil of knotty old rope, slowly tightening. I wasn't hungry, but something was off. I was tired, light-headed, low-energy, but my heart was racing. My eyes glazed over as I stared out the window of our rental SUV as we drove over the fog-shrouded Bay Bridge to Oakland. Some of this was nerves, sure. I had 28 days left of my month-long all-Soylent diet—I was attempting to live on the food replacement longer than anyone besides its inventor—and I felt woozy already.

We were en route to Soylent HQ, where the 25-year-old Rob Rhinehart and his crew were whipping up the internet famous hacker meal—the macro-nutritious shake they think will soon replace the bulk of our meals. It's just one of many visions currently vying for the future food crown. The world's population is still burgeoning, after all, 600 to 800 million people are going hungry every year, and the specter of food riots is perpetually percolating—the demand for cheap, nutritious food is greater than ever.

So Googlers are investing in vitro meat, biotech firms are genetically modifying crops that promise increasingly robust yields, and Silicon Valley is nurturing a bevy of future-forward alt-food companies. Then there's Rob, who came along and claimed that nobody had to eat food ever again.


Then, in what would soon prove irresistible fodder for Silicon Valley founder mythology, Rob lived on the yellow-grey stuff for 30 days, subjecting himself to lab tests and blogging the results. The concluding post, "How I Stopped Eating Food", became an online sensation.

Continue reading over at Motherboard.