The End of Food

““Most of people’s meals are forgotten,” he told me. He imagines that, in the future, “we’ll see a separation between our meals for utility and function, and our meals for experience and socialization.” Soylent isn’t coming for our Sunday potlucks. It’s coming for our frozen quesadillas.”

“the farm-to-table ethos has essentially bypassed the working class, which is left, instead, to live with the fallout of the low-cost food industry—obesity, diabetes, and, ironically, malnutrition. A recent U.N. report warned that climate change is threatening the global food supply, and that its impact will worsen in ways that aren’t confined to the poor.”

“Tim Gore, the head of food policy and climate change for Oxfam, has noted, “The main way that most people will experience climate change is through the impact on food: the food they eat, the price they pay for it, and the availability and choice that they have.””

“Rhinehart is not a fan of farms, which he refers to as “very inefficient factories.” He believes that farming should become more industrialized, not less. “It’s really the labor that gets me,” he said. “Agriculture’s one of the most dangerous and dirty jobs out there, and it’s traditionally done by the underclass. There’s so much walking and manual labor, counting and measuring. Surely it should be automated.””

“I noticed a bag of baby carrots: food! Rhinehart, who refers to food that is not Soylent as “recreational food,” explained that one of his roommates had bought them as a fun snack.”

“Rhinehart is reluctant to associate Soylent with any flavor, so for now it just contains a small amount of sucralose, to mask the taste of the vitamins. That seems to fit his belief that Soylent should be a utility. “I think the best technology is the one that disappears,” he said. “Water doesn’t have a lot of taste or flavor, and it’s the world’s most popular beverage.””

“Rhinehart’s bedroom is sparsely decorated, except for books on science and techno-utopianism: Steven Pinker, Isaac Asimov, R. Buckminster Fuller, the futurist and creator of the geodesic dome, whom Rhinehart admires for combining wild creativity with pragmatism.”

“Politically, Rhinehart said, he’s a “fallen libertarian.” He believes in maximizing freedom, but he hates the waste of capitalism. “Things are worthless,” he told me. In an effort to optimize the dressing process, he alternates between two pairs of jeans, and orders nylon or polyester T-shirts from Amazon, wearing them for a few weeks before donating them. When the clothes get smelly, he puts them in the freezer, to get rid of the odor. “Sometimes, during the day, a couple of hours will do it,” he told me. “I’ll wear a towel.””

“Rhinehart said that he liked the self-deprecating nature of the name, and the way it poked fun at foodie sensibilities: “The general ethos of natural, fresh, organic, bright—this is the opposite.””

“Sam Altman, of Y Combinator, mentioned Google and Facebook, and pointed out that search engines and social networks existed before both were created. “Most ideas, you can claim, are not new,” he said. “Often, they just haven’t been executed or marketed right.””

“Why go to so much trouble to make it meaty? Brown explained that the main challenge with food tech is cultural. “People have been eating meat for two million years,” he said. “They’re hardwired to love meat, and they love the trappings of meat—Thanksgiving, Christmas, ballgames.” The food truck was there to show that plant-based chicken and beef could be part of an all-American life style.”

“Soylent makes you realize how many daily indulgences we allow ourselves in the name of sustenance.”

“Eventually, Rhinehart hopes, he will figure out how to source all of Soylent’s ingredients that way—carbohydrates, protein, lipids. “Then we won’t need farms” to make Soylent, he said. Better yet, he added, would be to design a Soylent-producing “superorganism”: a single strain of alga that pumps out Soylent all day. Then we won’t need factories.”

“Rhinehart brought up Buckminster Fuller again: “Bucky has a very important idea of ephemeralization, which is something almost as a ghost—as pure energy or information.” Soylent-producing algae would make food a little like that: there would be no more wars over farmland, much less resource competition. To help a village full of malnourished people, “you could just drop in a shipping container” full of Soylent-producing algae. “It would take in the sun’s energy and water and air, and produce food.” Mankind’s oldest problem would be solved. Then, he added, all we’d have to do is fix the world’s housing problem, “and people could be free.””