Living on Soylent

Nearly a year’s worth of hype had filled me with trepidation about tasting Soylent for the first time. Reviewers haven’t been kind: Gawker described an early batch as tasting like "homemade nontoxic Play-Doh," while The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo calls it "purposefully bland." I also worried that I was adding a literal bottle of fish oil to each batch right before I shook it. Would it taste like a fish shake? Because that doesn’t sound appetizing at all.

But I was pleasantly surprised. The best way I can describe it is if you put a few tablespoons of peanut butter in a blender and filled the rest up with milk. It was considerably thinner than I’d expected, but still rich, creamy, and strangely satisfying. It had just the smallest tinge of sweetness. And at 38 grams of protein per serving, I wasn’t surprised that it consistently made me feel full.

Of course, there’s a big difference between trying a few sips of Soylent and having it substantially replace your entire diet.

It’s a rough process, and I expected it going in. I had three or four bouts of moderate digestive distress — yes, gas. But the real problem is that Soylent ignores the social and entertainment value of eating: food is not merely sustenance, it’s a tightly woven part of our everyday lives. How many times have you commiserated with a colleague over lunch? Planned a date over dinner? Met with friends for drinks? A strict diet of beige liquid fundamentally changes the patterns of your daily life, and not entirely for the better. It isolates you in ways you may not necessarily consider.

Food is not merely sustenance, it’s a tightly woven part of our everyday lives

Social challenge cropped up almost daily. Lunch meetings and briefings weren’t really an option, unless I wanted to awkwardly nurse a thermos full of Soylent in a restaurant while others ate (I didn’t). Weekly office-wide trips for dollar fish tacos on Monday nights were off limits. And I had to pass on having drinks with a friend, eventually meeting up to sip on a calorie-free, nutrient-free Diet Coke while he enjoyed some of the most delicious-looking beer I’d ever seen. (There’s an argument to be made that I should’ve cut diet sodas out of the Soylent experiment, too, but I had to draw the line somewhere — I wasn’t ready to survive on water, tea, and coffee alone.)

And, social element aside, it’s hard to overstate just how incredible food really is. If it was simply a means for survival, cities around the world wouldn’t be packed to the gills with restaurants. On Soylent, a walk through town becomes an excruciating journey past sights and smells — teases of a culinary world that you’re entirely cut out of.

What did surprise me was that I never really tired of the flavor of Soylent. I expected that by the end of the first week, I’d be dreading every sip, but I actually fell into a groove where I looked forward to my next glass. And it was nice recouping significant time otherwise spent looking for and eating food — perhaps an hour a day or more. Furthermore, if I was ordering Soylent month to month, I’d be paying $8.50 a day to get effectively all the nutrition and calories I needed to stay alive for the price of a standard New York City lunch.

So it’s a trade-off between efficiency and, well, living. Soylent isn’t living, it’s merely surviving.