What we talk about when we talk about Soylent
Who doesn’t love being in control of their destiny? Who doesn’t love food from a sealed tube?
Many years ago, I was talking to a friend on the phone while they were visiting a developer friend, a quintessential tech bro working in Silicon Valley.
This tech bro’s apartment was Spartan, to say the least. Or, I assume it was Spartan – – I never actually saw it, I just heard my friend shuffle around while on the phone, occasionally exclaiming things like “God, I can’t believe he doesn’t have… Any tables?” Or “the lighting in here makes me depressed.”
But because my friend woke up after the person they were staying with had left for work, they faced a bit of a dilemma. With their friend at work, and without a key to the apartment, they were trapped inside this bare bones tech bro lair.
If they left to go buy coffee or food, they would be stuck outside until their friend returned from work.
This low stakes Saw type puzzle incentivized my friend spending as much time as they could inside their friend’s apartment, in spite of the fluorescent lighting and lack of furniture.
But there was one major obstacle to them remaining — there was no food in this apartment.
As we talked on the phone I could hear them shuffling around, opening cabinets and drawers in a desperate bid to find something tolerable enough to stay inside.
“Ugh,” they said finally. “All they have in every one of these cabinets is just — Soylent.”
I don’t remember what they ended up doing for food. I think they had an instant oatmeal package in their luggage or something?
After a few hours, they said fuck it and got a banana or a bagel or something, resigned to having to spend the rest of the day outside while their friend was at work.
The only thing I remember for sure: they definitely didn’t drink any Soylent.
—
Last year at the peak of a “not great mental health summer” in the middle of a move, I found myself at Walgreens with no plan for groceries. I bought five bottles of Soylent, one of the items in the “health food” refrigerator section, next to the mini cheeses. Soylent comes in a bottle, not a tube, but the plastic itself is reminiscent of Gogurt, not in packaging but in texture — the type of plastic that makes up the bottle.
A bottle of Soylent has three seals: the plastic that covers the top coating on that you rip on the perforated side, the seal you break when you twist the cap open, and the seal that rips when anyone knows that you drink Soylent on a regular basis.
It was 90° and I had just moved a ton of heavy boxes up three flights of stairs, then carried a bunch of other heavy boxes to the dumpster. I didn’t care about what I was doing as long as it was food and I could eat it quickly. I read the label of the Soylent tube while I drank it, sitting on the Walgreen’s curb, and reading “corn protein, secretin,” in the label’s ridiculous little font made me feel secure, in control.
It was not my best moment, but it was also not my worst.
—
I’ve met several people who have, under duress, admitted they drink Soylent— but of these people have been especially excited to talk to me about drinking Soylent.
Inevitably, someone else, someone less perversely gleefully about Soylent than I am, will say something like “what’s the point of that? why bother being alive at all, if you can’t eat real food?” “I think I would die without frozen pizza”.
Usually the Soylent drinker stops abruptly at this, mutters something about convenience, and changes the subject.
I hate it when people less invested in Soylent than I am say things like this, because it immediately shut down the conversation. It makes talking about Soylent shameful, weirdly taboo. Worse, it always happens before we get to the good part – – the part where people feel comfortable enough to explain the real appeal of Soylent to them, not on a “nutritional “or “convenience“ level, but emotionally.
And that’s the part that I really want to know: why drink this stuff on a regular basis?
—
One time a friend and I were at the grocery store and we stopped in the refrigerated dairy aisle.
“Oh, look!” I said, not sticking to the grocery list, “Remember those little wax sealed babybel cheeses? All the girls at my high school ate those for lunch, it was such a trend.”
My friend said, “That’s what I ate every day for lunch when I was crazy bulimic — when you have a lunch that takes a lot of work to eat, it hides the fact that you’re not actually eating anything.” She continued to push the cart, undeterred from her grocery list even while reminiscing about high school. “It sucks, but that’s how you manage the rest of it. It’s like the more you control, the more other things you have to control.”
It took me until we got to the cleaning supply aisle to realize that what I had said and what she had said were related.
—
One time one of the dudes I was interrogating about the macros in Soylent broke down and said something earnest about Soylent. In my defense, I had been asking him questions about the nutrients in silent for a long time, more questions than anyone should have to answer about a topic so boring.
“I just… I really like the control.” he said quickly.
“This is a way for me to have power over what my body and mind do without being subject to whether or not I can find food in the office cafeteria. It’s about control, and about having control, and it works for me, and I’m fine with it. “He said the last part, faster, and with more intensity than most people usually say things about food.
I felt ashamed when he finally cracked — like I had manipulated him into saying, untoward things in mixed company. Though I suppose I had — I’ve never been in a social setting where talking about Soylent gained you any points in the social order.
What I thought, especially ashamed because the way he said it, a sort of confessional, was kind of awkward.
It felt kind of intimate in a way neither of us were prepared for.
It was intimate because he had said outright what we had all assumed about him drinking Soylent, about everyone who drinks Soylent.
He didn’t really need to say it out loud.