The only utensil provided for our four-course dinner was a straw. Even for a group of artsy coop students, this experiment in dining was asking a bit much, but we gamely sucked up soup, smoothies and compote like anteaters. I laughed, but I remember thinking that this all-liquid dinner was not one I cared to guinea pig for, ever again.
Fifteen years later, the complete liquid meal came along in the form of Soylent, billed as containing “all the protein, carbohydrates, lipids, and micronutrients that a body needs to thrive,” per the Soylent website. Soylent, some have argued, is not so different from SlimFast — it’s just marketed more hiply, as an acceptable, convenient lunch for men who desk-sit all day and are looking to efficiently forgo hunger while reducing their calorie load. Women just aren’t biting. In other words, Soylent is used by men who are, like the women who drink SlimFast, busy, impatient, on a diet, or all of the above.
But it’s the startup slickness of Soylent that makes it cool to drink — unscrewing your white Soylent bottle come noon has become a Snapchat-worthy event. The word “soylent,” after all, comes from the futuristic novel Soylent Green, while SlimFast conjures up images of Jane Fonda and eighties bikini babes.
My first sip of Soylent marked the beginning of my thought — my first serious one, at least — that we as a society might be moving away from food and toward a drink-based culture. A food-loving pal had told me he was drinking Soylent for most of his desk lunches, inspiring dismay and then curiosity in me. A gratis bottle of Soylent from a Taste Talks gift bag had been sitting untouched in my pantry for a couple months, so I cracked the seal and took a hesitant first sip, expecting space food that was somewhere between disgusting at worst and unappealing at best. Pleasantly surprised by the oaty, milky flavor and the ease with which it went down, I found it, if anything, inoffensive. It was the definition of a non-event for me — bland and boringly pleasant.
Perhaps food society will always relish fat-oozing pork belly, bitter greens and caramelized onions. Someday on Mars, humans may still slurp luscious lab-grown oysters, or farm fresh tomatoes in capsule greenhouses. But society as a whole may not always be so fond. These days, it seems millennials and Gen Z have more time for Instagramming their food than eating it.
