San Francisco in 2016 is a city that has already been satirized to death and decided it doesn’t care. Which is why an invitation to a dinner party where only Soylent would be served felt less like a bad joke than an inevitability.



Of course someone in San Francisco would host a “speculative dinner series investigating how dining together can satiate us when the food is out of focus”, and of course it would take place in the headquarters of a live/work space that describes itself as “a space for living, not just a space where people live”.

The only surprise is that it took this long.

“Future Repasts Vol 1: Company” unfolds in a featureless room on the second floor of said live/work space. Guests are asked to leave their cellphones outside, and to refrain from wearing distracting clothing or jewelry.

On the table are three pitchers: water, vodka and Soylent 2.0.

You have two hours to enjoy each other’s company, or not, depending on how seriously you take Sartre.

“We wanted to reduce the number of stimuli in the room to as close to zero as possible, outside of the participants themselves,” said Rebecca Power, an immersive gaming artist. Power and her partner, Kim Upstill, came up with Future Repasts as a way to “focus on the culture of eating instead of on the food itself”.

There is no natural rhythm to the evening,​ no sense of appreciation and gratitude for the cook

The pair hosted nine dinners featuring Soylent, the famous meal-replacement beverage, over the course of July and are planning future meals that will focus on other concepts, such as ritual.

There are a number of problems with a dinner party without food. One of the biggest is the lack of food.

Not quite a bacchanalian feast: ‘We wanted to reduce the stimuli to as close to zero as possible.’ Photograph: Alyssa Young

Soylent 2.0 might be an adequate replacement for the nutritional content of a meal, but a glass of thick white goo makes a poor substitute for the social experience of breaking bread with a group of adults.

(Even Soylent’s creator Rob Rhinehart seems to be aware of this fact. He’s currently in hot water for failing to clean up after hosting a pig roast party in a shipping container on a hilltop in Los Angeles.)

Rob Rheinhart and a glass of his creation, Soylent. Photograph: Matthew Mountford/Julio Miles/Soylent

There is no natural rhythm to the evening imposed by the succession of courses, no sense of appreciation and gratitude for the cook, no built in distraction for the socially awkward.

There is only Soylent, a liquid that is not as bad as it could be and not as good as anything else that qualifies as food. (It tastes like the dust from the non-marshmallow part of Lucky Charms cereal, only goopier.)

For Power, the lack of distraction (and satisfaction) is the point.

“Eating in the ‘Company’ room gives people the opportunity to focus on each other and come closer,” she said. “The fundamental, universal element of eating together, which is companionship, shared experience, those seem to stick around.”

People also seem to get drunk faster when they only have Soylent in their stomachs.

Power attended some of the dinners herself, and found that her guests had a tendency to treat the meal as performance art, which was not her intention. She prefers the term “situational design”.

“We had a meal where everyone turned their chair around,” she said. “We had a meal where people poured their vodka on the table to question what art was.”



At the meal I attended, we mostly talked about Soylent.

What was it about San Francisco in 2016 that made people want to get rid of all the wonderful tasty things in life – like food – and replace them with a bland, nutritious goop?

Was Soylent the result of a generation of young men who never grew up and needed to invent a socially acceptable way to drink breast milk in their twenties?

Did anyone else want to go get a pizza?

The answers, in case you were wondering, are: who knows, yes and yes.