An unassuming USPS box arrived in my mailbox this afternoon, but the label had a word in it that I'd been hoping to see: "SOYLENT." Unpacking, I laid the contents on the counter in front of me. These were five shiny, bulky pouches. They crinkled dully when I touched them, sounding and feeling like the heavy-duty plastic used to wrap military MRE rations.

Arrayed on the counter in front of me was what the technology press has been calling both the future of food and a harbinger of the downfall of modern society: Soylent.

Soylent is a nutritionally complete meal replacement that is being created by Rob Rhinehart, a young engineer and entrepreneur. The story of the product's development has been chronicled by Vice, Forbes, and tons of other huge tech outlets, so re-spinning the tale in detail here would be duplicating the efforts of far better journalists than I. Rhinehart's intent is for Soylent to be a cheap, universally available meal replacement that can reduce a meal to a quick checkbox that you can tick and then move on with your day. Soylent isn't necessarily supposed to be the kind of thing you live on forever—though Rhinehart says he has been subsisting on Soylent for months with no apparent ill effects. Rather, this is something that you can consume when stopping to prepare food is inconvenient. Soylent, explains Rhinehart in the product's crowdfunding campaign page, is intended to almost be like the food equivalent of water—"cheap, healthy, convenient, and ubiquitous."

There are lots of claims being made about Soylent by lots of different folks, many good, many terrible. None of them have been independently evaluated by the FDA. Interest is definitely sky-high, though, as the Soylent crowdfunding campaign annihilated its $100,000 target, eventually racking up more than a million dollars in preorders. There's an official forum, an unofficial subreddit, and an online database where folks can see and contribute homebrew Soylent-like recipes while they wait for their official batches to ship starting in September.

But what does it taste like? How does it make you feel? What does it do to your, you know, um, poop and stuff?

Like a good reviews editor, I wanted to get my hands on some of this stuff and write about it, so I reached out to Rhinehart and asked if he wouldn't mind shipping a bit of Soylent up to the Ars Orbiting HQ. I asked Senior Science Editor Dr. John Timmer if he wanted to partake, but I almost got my nose clipped off by his office door as he slammed it shut on me. (This experiment will be just me.) The "version" of Soylent we'll be looking at is a new one, version 0.89. Prior to its release, Rhinehart and a group of "beta testers" are making continual improvements to the formula with feedback from nutritionists and a lot of blood testing.

We're not going to be nearly so scientific in our testing, since I don't have ready access to a Siemens Dimension Xpand Plus blood assay machine like Rhinehart does. However, I am going full Soylent starting tomorrow morning—the garlic and olive oil chicken and couscous my wife and I had for dinner this evening (Monday, August 26) will be the last bit of solid food that I eat until Sunday morning. Rhinehart's Soylent will be my breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and I'll bring you guys along for the ride.

Every evening this week, expect a short update on progress. I won't go so far as to take pictures of the, er, bathroom end of things, but I'll absolutely be reporting on everything I feel. Five days isn't really enough to get more than the briefest of introductions to any new kind of eating regime, but I will strive toward being informative and entertaining. At the end, I'll have a feature-length write-up of what I went through and how it made me feel. I'll also be sitting down with Rhinehart to talk about the road ahead for Soylent.

Wish me luck as I temporarily stow my knife and fork and whip out my blender. Bottoms up!