Do you hate food? Then Soylent is for you.

You may have heard of the stuff: the scientifically calibrated complete-meal-replacement powder that you mix into a shake? The supposed antidote to the costly, wasteful, time-consuming ways humanity fills its 7.4 billion stomachs?

It’s basically Ensure with pre-apocalyptic hype and a postapocalyptic name that rode into the zeitgeist on $3 million of crowdfunding. Its founder, Rob Rhinehart, promoted it as a viable substitute for traditional food. Cue a stream of bloggers, preppers, tech-industry geeks and Rhinehart himself going on a 30-day, food-free, Soylent-only diet to prove we could wean ourselves off kitchens and restaurants.

Today, that aspect of the product is being played down. Soylent 2.0, which comes premixed in plain white plastic bottles, each representing one-fifth of a day’s recommended food intake, is depicted in promotional photos alongside a bowl of fresh strawberries. Part of this nutritious breakfast, it might as well say.

I had a dozen of these nondescript bottles delivered, thinking the food of the future would make the perfect fodder for I Ate This. I was wrong.

The point of Soylent is not the flavour — it doesn’t actually taste like much of anything, except soy milk and, vaguely, oatmeal. (Soy protein, algae, rice starch and oat fibre are key ingredients.)

It doesn’t taste bad. At first sip, it’s kind of pleasant. Just try not to imagine it as the only flavour you’ll ever experience for the rest of your life.

Soylent isn’t about flavour. By its nature (a “nutritionally complete staple food”), by its very philosophy (“simple, efficient, affordable”), a swig of Soylent should not excite the taste buds in any way.

If it did, it might remind you that there are such wonderful, pulse-quickening taste sensations out there as fried chicken, hot croissants and juicy mangoes. And that would be dangerous. Those are foods worth living for, and Soylent is not.

There’s plenty of room on that blank bottle for some evocative imagery — I dunno, a family taking refuge in a bomb shelter who would be quite content to subsist on Soylent alone. But that also wouldn’t fit with the company’s minimalist esthetic and food-industry-is-evil ethos.

Nor, for that matter, does the bottle have room for the many ingredients that come listed on the box in oversize lettering, ingredients such as isomaltooligosaccharide, phytonadione, biotin, sucralose and dl-alpha-tocopheryl acetate.

None of these sound delicious, which is what I hope our future to be.

Would I eat it again? I do plan to finish the 12 bottles I bought. I wouldn’t want to be wasteful.