The video above is a parody, but the product featured is real. Special thanks to celeb chef and star of Travel Channel's Bizarre Foods, Andrew Zimmern, for making a cameo in our video. Check out the show and follow Andrew on social media.
It's not an April Fool's Day joke. It's not a celebrity diet. It's not a marketing hoax related to the 1973 dystopian sci-fi film Soylent Green (spoiler).
Soylent is a real product that raised $1 million in a crowdfunding campaign and is now funded by well-known VCs, including Andreessen Horowitz and Lerer Ventures. It was created by Rob Rhinehart, who studied computer science and electrical engineering before leaving college to participate in Y Combinator with a previous startup.
In a story not unfamiliar to Silicon Valley, the technologist turned his focus to creating something fellow techies would use — in this case, a food replacement that provides all the necessary nutrients at a lower cost, and that requires almost no time to prepare.
In a sea of startups bringing us luxury items on sale and video aggregation platforms, programmers just want to optimize their busy lives. Why run user inputs one at a time when you can use asynchronous programming? (Hello, Node.js!) Similarly, why go to the store, buy ingredients, cook food and spend half an hour eating it and clean up afterward, when you could mix a simple, grayish beverage each morning and suck it down throughout the day at your leisure?
The ingredient list of Soylent is not public because the product is still in beta. However, the company has set up a community forum where members compare their own recipes (and discuss resulting changes in bodily fluids) while waiting for Soylent to be released to the public (slated for early 2014). Soylent is also discussed on r/soylent.
Over the course of the beta testing, Soylent worked to eliminate allergenic ingredients from the formula, but it does include 1% soy lecithin to keep the liquid smooth, and the oil, which is packaged separately, includes fish oil, the one ingredient in the formula that is not vegan. However, Rhinehart says it is kosher.
Entrepreneur and journalist Shane Snow lived off Soylent for two weeks, logged detailed health metrics and documented his experience. More recently, VICE released a documentary of reporter Brian Merchant's 30-day experiment with Soylent.
Soylent recently chose a manufacturer that will create future batches, and says it will be regulated as a food, not a supplement, thus requiring it to live up to higher standards.
Already, Soylent has a rival — Ambro, in Finland, wants to create a version that appeals to the health-conscious rather than the busy person, but does not expect to match the cost of Soylent, which is $10 per day.
Our initial reaction to Soylent is mixed — it's easy to laugh it off as a misguided idea that will result in health problems down the road, but there's that nagging memory of a 3 p.m. project you couldn't escape from, knowing you never got a chance for lunch — and running downstairs to grab a sandwich seems like such a hassle.
Soylent could be useful, but cooking and eating with friends is an enjoyable activity for many of us — plus, sharing a meal is a staple of our culture's social order, illustrated by the bestselling business book Never Eat Alone.
"Right now I only eat one or two conventional meals a week, but if I had any money or a girlfriend I would probably eat out more often," Rhinehart said in an interview earlier this year.
Still, the longterm effects of subsisting on Soylent are difficult to predict. Perhaps the product contains the nutrition a human needs, but what are the effects of living off only a liquid? Is a diet that varies day to day better than consuming the exact same thing each day?
Finally, we can't help but gawk at the product's name. When you have a somewhat shady product that you hope people will take seriously enough to consume it, why would you name it after a product in a film that turned out to be [spoiler].
In Rhinehart's words, he "likes to troll."
Image: Mashable