And although the drink is tastier than its horror sci-fi name implies, the whole idea of replacing lots of your meals with the same stuff day after day is a nightmarish prospect. It suggests that Soylent’s creators have forgotten a basic ingredient found in successful tech products, not to mention in most good foods. That ingredient is delight. 
 
 Most whiz-bang technologies don’t sell themselves on function alone; they’ve got to offer pleasure, too. My favorite recent example is the ride-sharing service Uber. Sure, hailing a cab on your phone is more convenient than waiting for one on a street corner. But that’s not the main reason people love Uber. They love it because Uber lets you feel like the boss: A car rushes to pick you up, and when it drops you off, you jump out without ever reaching for your wallet, as if you own the town. Uber isn’t using technology to sell convenience. It’s selling addictive thrills. It’s selling joy. 
 
 Besides offering no joy, Soylent presented other troubles. For much of the time I used it, Soylent produced gastrointestinal symptoms ranging from mildly irritating to perilous. Judging by other users’ online descriptions of my experiences, my gut’s reaction wasn’t unusual, but Mr. Rhinehart said it was likely to be temporary, the result of my body adjusting to the government-recommended amount of fiber in Soylent. 
 
 Image Robert Rhinehart spent months living on nothing but Soylent and claims it improved his health. 
 
 I believe him, but there are still questions about Soylent’s healthfulness. Though Mr. Rhinehart spent months living on nothing but Soylent and claims it improved his health, the firm has not performed any large-scale studies to show that drinking Soylent over an extended period of time is good for you, or even that it’s not bad for you. Mr. Rhinehart said the firm was conducting a large study, but he declined to divulge any details or a timeline for when it might post results. 
 
 Soylent’s biggest failing, though, is its stultifying utilitarianism. Even Mr. Rhinehart describes Soylent mainly in terms of its functional promise. “The most important aspect of this product is simplicity,” he told me. “We’re trying to abstract away the complexity. Here’s this drink that has everything you need, so if it’s your go-to meal, you don’t have to worry about anything else.” ||||| I’ve spilled a lot of virtual ink on Soylent over the past year—I count thirteen pieces, including the five-day experiment from last summer when I ate nothing but the stuff for a full week. This, though, is probably the last Soylent-specific piece that I’ll write for a while. It’s the piece that I’ve wanted to do all along. 
 
 Here we're going to talk about how the final mass-produced Soylent product fits into my life, without any stunts or multi-day binges. More importantly, we're going to take a look at exactly what might drive someone in the most food-saturated culture in the world to bypass thousands of healthy, normal, human-food meal choices in favor of nutritive goop. It's something a lot of folks simply can't seem to wrap their heads around. Today it's relatively easy to make a healthy meal, so why in the hell would anyone pour Soylent down their throat? 
 
 But if you're asking that question and genuinely can't see an answer, then you're demonstrating both a profound over-projection of your own cultural norms and also a stunning lack of empathy. Food is for some people a genuine struggle. Just because many in the first world have the ability to go to a grocery store and stock up on healthy stuff doesn't mean it's easy, or even possible, for everyone. Blithely dismissing someone's inability to whip up a healthy meal by tossing off a condescending "Soylent? Gross! You don't need that! Just go cook something quick and healthy!" can be about as wrongheaded and insensitive as telling an alcoholic that they could fix all their problems by just drinking less or telling a clinically depressed person that they'd feel better if they'd just stop moping and cheer up. 
 
 Everything in its place 
 
 Soylent has been released and it's in my house—great big boxes of the stuff, in fact. The difference between this time and my last encounter with it is that this go-round I'm not attempting to exist wholly on Soylent. Rather, I’ve been including it as an occasional component of my regular diet, tossing back a mug or two when I’m hungry but in the middle of doing other stuff. 
 
 So far, I haven’t forgotten how to eat normal food, nor have I found myself forsaking the heritage and culinary traditions of my native people (though as a fifth-generation American with a mutt-like mix of western European ancestry, I don’t really know what the hell my heritage and culinary traditions would be other than "beer, assorted"). I’m certainly not abandoning social interaction and slurping Soylent in solitude. I am eating it by myself, but I work from home. Unless I'm out interviewing someone, my lunches are almost exclusively quick solo affairs. For what it’s worth, I like eating lunch alone—I’m introverted, and spending time in silence and contemplation, whether it’s with an artisanal báhn mì sandwich from Nobi (just down the street off NASA Rd 1—highly recommended!) or with a mug of Soylent, is all equally refreshing. 
 
 Dinner is the big family meal of the day at Casa Hutchinson, and the fact that I’ve got boxes of powdered Soylent in my kitchen hasn’t changed that. My wife and I still eat together, and so far Soylent has stayed off the dinner menu. Either we’ll cook up something while catching up on our respective days, or we’ll go out to dinner together and do the same. At least to this point, Soylent has not driven any wedges between me and my friends or family. 
 
 Foodpocalypse 
 
 But those wedges are one of the things Soylent's critics fear the most: that the beige concoction will dissolve the interpersonal glue that the preparation and consumption of food provides. Other objections abound as well, and they run the gamut from reactionary and easily dismissed to thoughtful and troubling. 
 
 The easily dismissed ones concern Soylent’s "soy" content (there are only trace amounts) or its lack of originality. It’s not the first liquid nutrition product, but Soylent’s combo of affordability, calories, and purported nutritional completeness make it stand out over competitors like Ensure. In fact, according to the nutritional information on the Ensure site, drinking enough Ensure to reach 2000 calories would result in a person consuming a truly ludicrous 120 grams of sugar. Other non-medical products have similar issues, and actual medical-grade enteral nutrition products are far more expensive than Soylent. 
 
 Those objections about social dissolution, on the other hand, do genuinely sound troubling at first. Reducing food to a powder that can be mixed and drunk undermines millennia of evolution and culture and removes one of the fundamental differences between humans and other animals, even other hominids. We homo sapiens actually cook, and a significant part of our culture comes from that cooking and the rituals surrounding the preparation and consumption of food. 
 
 These are absolutely valid points—if one is arguing for or against the total replacement of "normal" food with Soylent. But not every meal needs to be a festive life-affirming display of cultural pageantry where we march from kitchen to table bearing the carefully plated masterpieces of locally sourced delicacies while hidden speakers blare the "Circle of Life" song from the Lion King. Sometimes, I need to eat over the keyboard while transcribing an interview, and sometimes I need to eat in the car. Soylent isn't replacing a culturally significant meal in those instances. As with all things, moderation is the key. 
 
 There are objections to which Soylent still has no good response. Sitting atop all of them is the fact that in spite of all we’ve learned about how the human body works, the nature of nutrition is still not entirely understood. Soylent attempts to provide the micro and macronutrients that a person needs in a day—but does it deliver? The final shipping product contains a whole raft of ingredients (which creator Rob Rhinehart and the Rosa Labs folks say will be changing over time as the formula evolves), but the quantity and mix of those ingredients is based on current US RDA standards. It’s still not wholly certain that simply hitting roughly 100 percent of the RDA standards is enough. 
 
 "Real" food—vegetable or meat or mineral—is a complex mixture of compounds and materials, with synergies forming between seemingly unrelated foods when eaten together. There is substantial evidence that eating two different types of foods yields more nutritionally than the sum of their parts would suggest; Soylent, with its componentized approach to nutrition, might be missing the nutritional forest in favor of the ingredient trees. 
 
 There’s no way to overcome that objection at this point. It may very well be correct, and Soylent may be missing something that a more holistic blend of ingredients would provide. Scientific studies on the effects of mid-to-long-term Soylent consumption on a person are nonexistent, and all we really have is anecdotal evidence that people have eaten it for many months without suffering any apparent problems. Rhinehart and several other early Soylent users are even tracking their blood chemistry (in fact, Rosa Labs purchased a Siemens Dimension XPand Plus Integrated Chemistry System to perform that analysis in-house), but there is so far no formalized research. 
 
 In other words, while it’s likely that Soylent probably isn’t doing anything bad—the ingredients, after all, are all well-known and well-studied—we just don’t know.
– The makers of Soylent say their product takes the stress out of trying to eat well by simplifying the process: Just drink the stuff, get all the nutrients you need, and skip actual food entirely. Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times gave it a shot but found it to be utterly "joyless." Soylent "may offer complete nourishment," he writes, "but only at the expense of the aesthetic and emotional pleasures many of us crave in food." (And the jury is still out on those health claims, but studies are underway.) He describes Soylent as being "like gritty, thinned-down pancake batter, inoffensive and dull" and is skeptical the masses will take to it. His gastrointestinal troubles didn't help the cause, either. "Soylent's creators have forgotten a basic ingredient found in successful tech products, not to mention in most good foods," writes Manjoo. "That ingredient is delight." For an opposing view, see Lee Hutchinson at Ars Technica, who has boxes of the stuff at home. He gets the point made by Manjoo and others, but "not every meal needs to be a festive life-affirming display of cultural pageantry where we march from kitchen to table bearing the carefully plated masterpieces of locally sourced delicacies while hidden speakers blare the 'Circle of Life' song from the Lion King." Sometimes you're busy, and that's where Soylent works. Replacing all your meals with Soylent would be overkill, he writes. "As with all things, moderation is the key." Click for his full column, or for Manjoo's full column.