Imagine a meal made of the milk left in the bottom of a bowl of cut-rate cereal, the liquid thickened with sweepings from the floor of a health food store, and you have some sense of what it is like to consume the protein-packed shakes that have replaced Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and Red Bull in the diets of some tech workers in Silicon Valley.

Some of them elevate Ensure, the liquid nutritional supplement used in hospitals and to force-feed prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, to the status of fine wine.

I tasted three varieties in my capacity as food editor of The New York Times. For verisimilitude, I ate at my computer while lurking among my Times programming colleagues on Slack, the hot new group-messaging app that recently reached a $2.8 billion valuation in Silicon Valley.

“Hey, fellas, just doing a code review on some new features for Cooking” — which is The Times’s online recipe resource — “and drinkin’ some Soylent!”