Soylent is a food substitute, in theory you could live on it for a long time. It’s one of the current hot things among the techie set, so it’s no surprise that Soylent just brought in a million dollars in venture capital.
The venture capitalists have put their money where they think their mouths will be – on the rim of a glass filled with a cheaper, easier, nutritious, and faster way to fuel a human. One big selling point is the time savings for Soylent drinkers, no shopping or cooking with very little clean up.
Cellphones let humans communicate more efficiently and easily. But instead of freeing people, cellphones have become shorter leashes because most of the free time they generate doesn’t get used in free time type pursuits. There’s not much judicious use of cellphones.
Soylent has its place, but it opens some doors that will be hard to close. So will Soylent be the next cellphone? Will bosses and others who want to use your time for their purposes begin to creep into the time that used to be allocated for normal, regular eating? “Oh you haven’t heard? We’ve changed the lunch hour to the 4.6 minute Soylent refuel, get back to work.”
Whenever we hear about someone who cooks meals for their dog we’re usually struck by the craziness of not using dog chow, they’re wasting their time when a more sensible alternate is easily had.
Will people be willing to shoehorn more work/school/training into their lives by switching from eating to fueling? Probably. Our culture tends to measure our worth by how efficient we are. Is it worth it? Someone said once that “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Faster and more efficient at what cost?
Remember the picture of Michael Jordan on a golf course back in the day using one of those early brick sized cellphones? Its cartoon-like now that we’ve become used to the current cellphone technology. I’m sure Soylent is just the beginning, it’s the brick sized cellphone.
Purina human chow isn’t too far off.