Tasters have compared Soylent to Cream of Wheat and “my grandpa’s Metamucil.” Photograph by Henry Hargreaves

In December of 2012, three young men were living in a claustrophobic apartment in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, working on a technology startup. They had received a hundred and seventy thousand dollars from the incubator Y Combinator, but their project—a plan to make inexpensive cell-phone towers—had failed. Down to their last seventy thousand dollars, they resolved to keep trying out new software ideas until they ran out of money. But how to make the funds last? Rent was a sunk cost. Since they were working frantically, they already had no social life. As they examined their budget, one big problem remained: food.

They had been living mostly on ramen, corn dogs, and Costco frozen quesadillas—supplemented by Vitamin C tablets, to stave off scurvy—but the grocery bills were still adding up. Rob Rhinehart, one of the entrepreneurs, began to resent the fact that he had to eat at all. “Food was such a large burden,” he told me recently. “It was also the time and the hassle. We had a very small kitchen, and no dishwasher.” He tried out his own version of “Super Size Me,” living on McDonald’s dollar meals and five-dollar pizzas from Little Caesars. But after a week, he said, “I felt like I was going to die.” Kale was all the rage—and cheap—so next he tried an all-kale diet. But that didn’t work, either. “I was starving,” he said.

Rhinehart, who is twenty-five, studied electrical engineering at Georgia Tech, and he began to consider food as an engineering problem. “You need amino acids and lipids, not milk itself,” he said. “You need carbohydrates, not bread.” Fruits and vegetables provide essential vitamins and minerals, but they’re “mostly water.” He began to think that food was an inefficient way of getting what he needed to survive. “It just seemed like a system that’s too complex and too expensive and too fragile,” he told me.

What if he went straight to the raw chemical components? He took a break from experimenting with software and studied textbooks on nutritional biochemistry and the Web sites of the F.D.A., the U.S.D.A., and the Institute of Medicine. Eventually, Rhinehart compiled a list of thirty-five nutrients required for survival. Then, instead of heading to the grocery store, he ordered them off the Internet—mostly in powder or pill form—and poured everything into a blender, with some water. The result, a slurry of chemicals, looked like gooey lemonade. Then, he told me, “I started living on it.” Rhinehart called his potion Soylent, which, for most people, evokes the 1973 science-fiction film “Soylent Green,” starring Charlton Heston. The movie is set in a dystopian future where, because of overpopulation and pollution, people live on mysterious wafers called Soylent Green. The film ends with the ghastly revelation that Soylent Green is made from human flesh.

Rhinehart’s roommates were skeptical. One told me, “It seemed pretty weird.” They kept shopping at Costco. After a month, Rhinehart published the results of his experiment in a blog post, titled “How I Stopped Eating Food.” The post has a “Eureka!” tone. The chemical potion, Rhinehart reported, was “delicious! I felt like I’d just had the best breakfast of my life.” Drinking Soylent was saving him time and money: his food costs had dropped from four hundred and seventy dollars a month to fifty. And physically, he wrote, “I feel like the six million dollar man. My physique has noticeably improved, my skin is clearer, my teeth whiter, my hair thicker and my dandruff gone.” He concluded, “I haven’t eaten a bite of food in thirty days, and it’s changed my life.” In a few weeks, his blog post was at the top of Hacker News—a water cooler for the tech industry. Reactions were polarized. “RIP Rob,” a comment on Rhinehart’s blog read. But other people asked for his formula, which, in the spirit of the “open source” movement, he posted online.

One of Silicon Valley’s cultural exports in the past ten years has been the concept of “lifehacking”: devising tricks to streamline the obligations of daily life, thereby freeing yourself up for whatever you’d rather be doing. Rhinehart’s “future food” seemed a clever work-around. Lifehackers everywhere began to test it out, and then to make their own versions. Soon commenters on Reddit were sparring about the appropriate dose of calcium-magnesium powder. After three months, Rhinehart said, he realized that his mixture had the makings of a company: “It provided more value to my life than any app.” He and his roommates put aside their software ideas, and got into the synthetic-food business.

To attract funding, Rhinehart and his roommates turned to the Internet: they set up a crowd-funding campaign in which people could receive a week’s supply of manufactured Soylent for sixty-five dollars. They started with a fund-raising goal of a hundred thousand dollars, which they hoped to raise in a month. But when they opened up to donations, Rhinehart says, “we got that in two hours.” Last week, the first thirty thousand units of commercially made Soylent were shipped out to customers across America. In addition to the crowd-funding money, its production was financed by Silicon Valley venture capitalists, including Y Combinator and the blue-chip investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, which contributed a million dollars.

Soylent has been heralded by the press as “the end of food,” which is a somewhat bleak prospect. It conjures up visions of a world devoid of pizza parlors and taco stands—our kitchens stocked with beige powder instead of banana bread, our spaghetti nights and ice-cream socials replaced by evenings sipping sludge. But, Rhinehart says, that’s not exactly his vision. “Most of people’s meals are forgotten,” he told me. He imagines that, in the future, “we’ll see a separation between our meals for utility and function, and our meals for experience and socialization.” Soylent isn’t coming for our Sunday potlucks. It’s coming for our frozen quesadillas.

Last month, not long before the first batch of Soylent was shipped, I visited Rhinehart and his team at their new headquarters, a large house in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles. (They moved from San Francisco six months ago, in search of cheaper rents.) Rhinehart met me at the door, dressed in jeans, a black V-necked T-shirt, and black tennis shoes. He was healthy-looking, which was encouraging—for the past year and a half, he’s been living almost exclusively on Soylent, drinking it for “ninety per cent” of his meals.

Rhinehart can seem like a young missionary: he has sharp features, a gentle voice, and an upright, stiff gait. Though he is a millennial, he has a slightly ageless quality—which makes sense, since Soylent upends many of the behavioral trends of the generation that invented the lunch shared on Instagram. Topics such as pop culture and gossip don’t come up much with him, and he seems unmoved by consumer culture in any form: I spent one long afternoon sitting in on a “journal club” meeting, where he and some friends asked one another questions like “Do you think microfluidics might have applications outside diagnostics?” But he has a bone-dry sense of humor. On his blog, he writes comedy sketches pitching imaginary inventions. (Genetically modified kittens: “The future is meow.”)

Before driving to the Soylent headquarters, I had stopped at an expensive California juice bar, and I was carrying a nine-dollar cold-pressed juice, served in a glass milk bottle. Rhinehart examined the drink as if it were a flint arrowhead. “It’s kind of archaic,” he said, and pointed out that it was mostly sugar. “Look at the design. It’s meant to be rustic and natural and comfortable. . . . In fact, it’s pretty bad for you.”