I opened my apartment door, and noticed my third monthly shipment of Soylent waiting for me. Standing over it was a delivery guy from Domino’s pizza. He had my sausage and pineapple pizza with their recently improved crust.

Their simultaneous arrival was a good sign that something went wrong.

I love the concept of Soylent: a food that eliminates the challenges of food. There are a lot of people out there that don’t like the idea because it doesn’t live up to the “joy of eating”. I respectfully disagree with them. Admit it: not every meal is joyous. There are rushed sandwiches at lunch; afternoon “I don’t want to ruin my dinner plans, but I have to eat” moments, and “I have to be careful about what I eat before this workout” panics. There are few things I enjoy less than begrudgingly figuring out where I’m going to eat lunch, paying $12, then possibly feeling disgusting for the afternoon. When Soylent was announced, it seemed like the perfect solution for so many of those “I don’t want to deal with the process of meals” meals.

For the uninitiated, Soylent is a very well-marketed meal-replacement product. Presented more like software than food, it was a huge hit on a crowdfunding site, and acts as a pregnant punchline for my generation of self-employed desk-bound millennial types. #Soylentpioneers pay $7 per day’s worth Soylent powder and a small bottle of oils. Shipments come monthly in one, two or four week quantities, with a multiple month-long wait for new subscribers. Blended with water, Soylent’s mixture will cover 100% of your dietary needs for the course of one day. It tastes like an extremely mild vanilla cake,and has the consistency of a slightly chalky milkshake. If humans ever become domesticated pets for some greater beings, this is what they would feed us.

Despite all the factors in my life that point to Soylent being a great solution for me, I now have approximately six weeks worth of the stuff in futuristic white boxes under my desk. My diet went from one Soylent meal per day, to two, then back down to one. My most recent Soylent “meal” was about four days ago.

What went wrong? It depends on what version of Soylent we’re talking about. As more data pours into Rhinehart Labs from more and more users taking the plunge, they continue to refine and tweak their formula. My 14 bags (42, meals) of “Version 1" made for satisfying meals, but caused incredible gas. One of my friends accurately described his Soylent aftermath as “rich”, while a reviewer from Ars Technica likened it to “room-clearing, horse-killing, World War I mustard gas-type gas". Until I started pre-treating each shake with a Gas-X, every single serving of Version 1 left me homebound and foul. It took me a full month and a half to get through that case, all while convincing myself that it was still the solution to many of my problems.

“Version 1.1" was initially a godsend for me. After getting lots and lots of feedback about peoples’ digestive challenges, an enzyme was added to the mixture to aid digestion and ease gas. As soon as my box of V1 was exhausted, I cautiously set aside my Gas-X, cleared my evening schedule, and had an upgraded meal. I was relieved to find that the new ingredients worked, and I was finally able to eat Soylent in public without fear.

With the food finally cooperating with my body, I was able to experiment using it for more than one meal per day. It just didn’t work. I’m not sure if it’s due to my specific body-chemistry, or the relatively high amounts of physical activity I do, but the shakes weren’t satisfying to me. I could drink about half of one serving before losing my appetite for the stuff, and would always immediately crave salty snacks after the fact. It’s a fairly well documented fact (bug?) that additional sodium might be needed for some users, and I am definitely one of them. On the days where I tried my hardest to have Soylent for both breakfast and lunch, I’d end up hungry for goldfish crackers, pretzels and nuts. I would also become entirely sick of consuming anything remotely sweet. The diet left me with a headache and made me a little bit irritable. All in all, bad results. Eating regular food hadn’t suddenly become appealing to me, but those side-effects weren’t worth the savings in time and cash.

Near the end of the “really trying to make this stuff work for me” stage of experimenting with Soylent, I had the honor of doing a two-day shoot in a remote forest with Bear Grylls. At the end of the first night, we were having dinner around the campfire when Soylent came up in the conversation. I told everybody about my experience with the stuff, and they were flabbergasted. Bear — a man internationally-known for eating terrible things — could not figure out why I’d eat something like that. He talked about the “joy of eating”, I countered with the occasional “pain in the ass of eating”, and he thought I was insane. Later that night, I complimented the campfire-roasted meal we had eaten. Bear couldn’t resist calling me out for “just being excited to chew on something”.

Photo by Michael Jones

The social repercussions didn’t stop with Mr. Grylls. Despite keeping dinner holy as a traditional social meal, losing those mid-day “I don’t know what to eat, let’s just get tacos” lunches caused some tension between myself and my (uninterested in Soylent) girlfriend. She was feeling deserted during the meals that I skipped in favor of beige drinks at my desk. My job keeps me very busy, and those meals were more important to our relationship than I realized.

There’s a good chance that my position on Soylent would be different if I worked away from home, if I was still single and living on my own, or if I didn’t have demanding exercise habits. My brilliant plan to replace ten meals per week with $33 worth of Soylent simply doesn’t work for my very specific needs.

I’ll still chip my way through those white boxes, and continue to get a small monthly shipment. Soylent can’t be a major part of my diet, but it still works great as as a snack, or as an easy last-minute panic meal. I honestly believe that Rob Rhinehart is doing something fantastic for a lot of people. Soylent has a lot of potential outside of overworked young professionals. The cheap, nutritious food can do a ton of good when it finds its way into places that aren’t lucky enough to trade a $3 meal for delivered pizza.