And, now, for the anti-foodies out there

There’s so much foodie in the air these days.

Farm to table. Nose to tail. Foam this. Nasturtium that. Vegan. Fregan. Oat milk. Sustainably, fair trade sourced 100% cacao. Paleo only, please.

How can an eater possibly keep up? Sometimes it’s enough to make me want to flip open a can of Chef Boyardee Ravioli and eat it cold, right out of the can.

So it’s a good reminder that there are those out there who aren’t focused on whether what they ingest is tasty, interesting, novel, outré. Folks who take a more utilitarian approach to eating.

Some of those folks are customers of Soylent, “the contrarian food replacement company that made its name hawking beige, drinkable meals to time-crunched Silicon Valley workers.”

Where to begin?

Well, obviously with the name Soylent, homage to the 1973 dystopian classic Soylent Green, which included the line – I was going to say “deathless line”, but obviously that wasn’t the case – “soylent green is people.” That was because soylent green was made of human remains. And no, it didn’t taste like chicken.

Anyway, the folks at Soylent thought that this macabre name was fitting for their “beige drinkable meals.”

How time-crunched do you need to be that you resort to “beige drinkable meals”?

I mean, I’ve been time-crunched, but that usually translates into PB&J and an orange. And if I’m really time-crunched, I’ve been known to throw nutrition to the wind and down a sleeve of Girl Scout Thin Mints or a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.

Beige and drinkable?

Towards the end of his life, my husband drank plenty of Ensure, and, well, no one wants a steady diet of Ensure, even if it comes in chocolate (brown), strawberry (pink), or vanilla (white) – not beige. If you’re on a liquid diet, you’re probably not in a great place, healthwise.

Anyway, Soylent wanted to expand their product line into solids, and at first they were thinking it would be in the form of a cube – a 21st century meatless bouillon cube, I guess. And then they discovered that cubes, unless it’s a bouillon cube or Ex-Lax, “are really difficult to do.”

So a couple of weeks ago, the company:

…unleashed the next-best-thing: Soylent Squared, a 100-calorie, very much chewable “mini-meal,” which is not a cube, but instead a perfect (perfect!) square.

“We basically start as a meal replacement drink mostly consumed in the morning and powder in a ready to drink format,” Mr.[Bryan] Crowley [the company’s chief executive] said. “Now we’re a complete nutrition platform that you can enjoy any time of the day in multiple formats.” (Source: NY Times)

Nutrition platform?

Jeez Louise. Why does food have to have a platform? Am I the only one nostalgic for the days when a platform was something you the wedding party sat on, or a political party stood for.

Platform is a term that took over the tech world a decade or so back, and things that used to be products – or, yuck, solutions – all of a sudden had to be platforms. Whether they were or not.

And multiple formats?

Big deal.

Food comes it lots of different formats. Liquid. Solid. Foodie foam. Animal. Vegetable. Mineral. Round. Square. Oblong. Oval. Banana-shaped.

Multiple colors, too!

The only food in my fridge that’s beige are eggs. I get those beige eggs because “brown eggs are local eggs, and local eggs are best.”

But I have a lot of real colors in there. White milk. Red peppers. Blueberries. Oranges. Yellowish cheese (cheddar). White cheese (feta). Red with some green apples. Green grapes. Darker green parsley. Purple grape juice. A veritable rainbow of delights.

Anyway, Soylent’s bringing out an actual use-your-teeth food stuff rather than its original gulp-and-go liquid signals the company’s evolution.

When it first emerged from Silicon Valley in 2014, Soylent was billed as a step beyond food — that time-consuming, tooth-exhausting replenishment favored by everyday humans. It was superfood for the teched-out super-person, an extreme lifestyle choice adapted by people who felt comfortable with extremity.

The product’s inventor, Rob Rhinehart, an electrical engineer by training, claimed in a blog post introducing the product that upon drinking it, he felt like “the six million dollar man.”

And maybe the six million dollar man felt plastic and too teched out? Have you thought of that? Did Colonel Steve Austin ever once say “I feel really great?” If so, I don’t recall the episode.

I must also add that I tend to avoid food products that were “invented”. Products that are invented sound way too Hot Pocket-y. I prefer food products that are naturally themselves, like oranges. Or cooked up. Half baked, even.

Invented? Never!

But I’m not one of those techies looking for:

…a new tool to maximize their efficiency, something that could enhance performance by requiring them to waste less time eating.

And there are at least a few of them out their: “the Soylent Reddit community today is nearly 34,000 strong.”

Soylent’s not the only one in the tech’d out food biz, but I’d just as soon avoid all of it, even if Soylent is trying to make sure that its products are “tasty and enjoyable.”

An earlier foray into solid food was apparently not so successful:

…the first attempt at solid Soylent — the Food Bar — was quickly pulled from circulation after customers reported vomiting and diarrhea.

Maybe they should have included bottles of Pepto Bismol. A liquid chaser, making it a multiple format offering. And the pink would provide color diversity. What a platform! Maybe I have a future in food invention.

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A tip of the toque blanche to my sister Kath, an excellent cook, who pointed this article in my direction.