Could you live off Soylent for a month?

No cooking, no mess, no waste… no food. Soylent, the world’s first total nutritional substitute, might sound like science fiction but the powdered meal replacement has arrived. Stephen Armstrong gives up meals for a month

Stephen Armstrong

19 June 2014

What if you never had to worry about food? You never needed to visit a supermarket, chop a carrot, fire up a frying pan or puzzle over the calorie count of a bag of popcorn ever again? What if you could satisfy all your nutritional needs with one simple, nutritionally balanced shake? Wouldn’t that be amazing?

That’s the promise from Soylent — a product that shows what happens when Silicon Valley billionaire hopefuls leave widgets alone for a while and thought- shower on other matters. Rob Rhinehart, a 25-year-old software engineer — the wannabe Steve Jobs of your dinner — put his first Soylent mix together during an extended run of living on noodles and McDonald’s while trying to get an engineering start-up off the ground. Working on the assumption that preparing and eating food is inefficient, he attacked it as an engineering problem, buying raw chemical components and mixing them according to the US government’s nutritional recommended daily allowance.

The first portion, he blogged, was ‘Delicious! I felt like I’d just had the best breakfast of my life!’ After 30 days, he claimed his physique had improved, his skin was clearer, his teeth whiter, his hair thicker and his dandruff had disappeared. At the same time, his original start-up (something to do with mobile phone masts) failed… but his investors liked the sound of this shake that had replaced his need for food so, in May, he launched Soylent with the slogan ‘Free your body’. Free your body from food, that is.

We spend 39 minutes per day eating, according to one 2011 study, with some 34 minutes spent cooking — adding up to almost ten whole days imprisoned by food every year. Soylent’s website promises: ‘Prepare multiple meals in minutes’; ‘No need to shop for individual ingredients or plan ahead. Spend less than $10 per day on food. Get all the essential nutrients required to fuel the human body.’ Which, as a bloke who lives alone and works on the premise that if it takes longer to prepare than it does to eat it’s a waste of time, I have to admit has a certain appeal. When the National Obesity Forum warned in March that Brits are spending 34 minutes cooking our evening meals, compared to an hour in 1980, I thought they were telling us to hurry up. If I could cut back — spend, say, just ten minutes a day on food — it would give me almost an hour to power-nap, reply to emails or start that novel.

Off-the-shelf Soylent isn’t yet available in the UK but Rhinehart thoughtfully posted the recipe online. Now there are hundreds of variants on the diy.soylent.me forum, with ingredients available from the local Amazon sites in 49 grateful nations. Soylent also offers a personal nutrient profile calculator, which suggested I adopt the US government’s Dietary Reference Intake recommendations: male, 19-50, 2,500 calories per day.

Applying this to the list of UK available recipes — from Diet Liquid Cake v1.2 to Extreme Walrus Juice: Genetic 1 — I picked People Chow UK as the least weird option that could deliver 100 per cent of the ingredients for my profile. A sack of whey, potassium gluconate, choline bitartrate, soybean oil, psyllium husk powder, Mexican flour and vitamin pills arrived in the post the next day. This is exactly how the time-poor city dweller likes to shop and eat, I thought, as I spooned magnesium powder into my blender and turned the dial. What’s not to like?

Soylent, it turns out. Once mixed with water, the resulting pile of soft brown goo tasted like a diseased wheat smoothie, no matter how much vanilla essence I sprinkled. Rhinehart is keen to underline that it’s Soylent’s very absence of flavour that makes it attractive — ‘If it had an overly specific flavour, it would be gruelling to eat as often as I do,’ he posted recently.

Soylent creator Rob Rhinehart

I had some reservations. It’s risky installing new software from a start-up at the best of times; the last thing you want to hear on a technical helpline is ‘Have you tried shutting down and rebooting the system?’ when the system includes your kidneys. I’m not a health fanatic — I go to the gym about three times a week and don’t smoke but I drink unhealthy amounts of alcohol and eat literally anything. The Nuffield Health Centre near Cannon Street agreed to monitor my progress. At the initial check-up they said my cholesterol was a bit high and I had too much protein in my diet but, all things considered, I could be worse.

‘The most obvious problems with this aren’t fatal,’ Abigail Seward, Nuffield’s nutritional therapist, told me cheerfully as she perused my People Chow recipe. ‘The category “male 19-50” is ridiculous: men’s nutritional needs vary as they age. You do exercise so I’m not sure this is giving you sufficient calories. The whey protein is very quickly absorbed which can put strain on the kidneys, and the fact that you won’t chew means you’ll produce no leptin, a hormone that staves off obesity. Plus, you’re missing out on all sorts of plant-based nutrients that don’t feature in government guidelines but seem to have health benefits, and you’re getting your vitamins in a chemical form which means their action is diminished. But hey… good luck.’ And I was off.

Giving up food was a little like giving up smoking — intense and difficult for the first week or so, until my body adapted. But foregoing fags made me fart less, and gave me no sharp acid indigestion. The real problems began with my blend of open-source recipe and slapdash attitude, about halfway through day two. Mixing the first batch of People Chow on my dented kitchen scales I found it tricky to weigh anything more precisely than to the nearest 20g. Which was fine for 350g of flour, but a little less scientific for 6g of salt. I made a rough stab at it, and erred on the generous side. Thirty-six hours later — around midday — I developed a strong salt flavour at the back of my throat, a desperate thirst and started to feel a little peculiar. This is not uncommon. Many people find they’re drinking so much Soylent they forget to drink anything else. Like water. I was developing the early symptoms of dehydration.

That day, as it happened, I was on a set visit interviewing the actor Cillian Murphy. With a slight air of panic I chugged down a bottle of water, then another. Mid interview, I asked Cillian if he had any bottles in his trailer. He seemed to think it was a trick question. The production team eyed me nervously at lunch as I sucked from the teat of my Soylent bottle. ‘You’re worse than the vegans,’ the catering manager grumbled as she wiped spilled goo from the table.

Daily life slipped into a dreamlike alternate universe where I could observe the normal world but not take part. Even though I’d not given up booze or coffee, I found I was cutting back; having no food in my stomach meant that caffeine and alcohol seemed amplified. I was jittery after a strong black americano and slurry after a glass or two of wine. I felt slightly restless and was intensely aware of the nuances of my own body: measuring and calibrating in an endless internal dialogue, never quite hungry, never completely full. It was a bit like getting stoned on Boxing Day only to find your mum has invited the neighbours over.

I carried a small container with me everywhere, constantly topping up — sipping and gulping down mouthfuls of the powdery gunge every hour or so. A glass of Soylent seems to last about 90 minutes. Two glasses and you feel bloated. It became an obsession: measuring out time between doses to estimate calorie count and protein levels, sipping water to keep hydrated… Instead of releasing me from food, it tied me to Soylent.

Power chow: Stephen Armstrong before and after

I developed an overwhelming desire for toast, accompanied by murderous intentions towards anyone biting through a buttered bagel. People, unless you have lived a week on Soylent you will never know how good the smell of perfectly toasted bread can be. Watching my girlfriend’s teeth nibble delicately at the firm hard crust then pull apart the soft white innards felt darkly pornographic. I would suck in the aroma and visual textures like an ageing ex-smoker hanging around outside the pub, lasciviously gorging on the smoke puffed out of teenagers’ mouths.

‘Stop watching me eat,’ my girlfriend broke into my reverie. ‘You’re making me feel fat.’ Which proved a common opinion. Here’s a newsflash: people don’t like being watched while they eat. And most of my social life involved eating. Indeed, most of London involves eating. If Soylent heralds the end of food, it also heralds the end of Soho, Mayfair, and a good chunk of the South Bank, just to name the areas where I sat feeling mad and desperate watching my friends enjoy fragrant Thai noodles or hearty burgers or even a packet of nuts.

Over time, elements of the diet normalised. The savage indigestion and the flatulence subsided. I could sometimes go for an hour or so without even thinking about Soylent. But lunchtimes were no longer a merry flirt with the girls in Pret, dinner was a silent affair and we shall not speak of the horror of breakfast. At the end of three weeks, I broke. I couldn’t make the 30 days. I couldn’t go another evening sitting at a table watching my friends chow down on chicken tikka masala while I nursed a bottle of oaty gunk. I couldn’t face another train journey home without the joy of mulling my meal choice. I started mixing Soylent with food, starting with dinner, then lunch, until eventually it became just a breakfast shake.

To be fair, Rhinehart seems to have retreated a little on his scorched-earth crusade against real food. He now acknowledges the existence of what he calls ‘recreational food’. He says he expects consumers to use Soylent for between 60 and 80 per cent of their food needs. I imagine that Generation Rent, if crammed into shared accommodation with all housemates agreeing on a Soylent diet, might be happy to chug shakes together. It is cheap, after all: the pre-packaged stuff I was having costs £50 for 21 meals while Soylent costs about £120 per week. And it’s sort of nourishing. After my last meal I had another check-up at the Nuffield. Despite me gobbling down great gutfuls of the stuff, I’d lost weight — half a kilo — but it had been counterintuitive, as my stomach felt soggy. My cholesterol levels had also gone down, which shut me up, but my protein levels were way too high. As were my spirits as I walked out. Ignoring Seward’s advice to return to solids gently, I celebrated with a steak, which tasted like a French kiss from Aphrodite but left me with a nasty bout of mutinous bowels.

My spell on Soylent was over. In truth, however, it’s some part of all of our futures. Its largely synthetic components mean it demands little land to produce. It’s pure, as long as the water you make it with is, too. And rivals are on the way; in January, the Swiss food giant Nestlé began testing a range of similarly functional foods on human stem cells.

Me, I’ve gone the other way. I’ve reaffirmed my vows with proper grub. I’ve even bought a couple of recipe books and started enjoying my kitchen. The ritual of a meal with friends is more intense, as if I’ve been in food prison and am cherishing my return. And I have to report that my teeth are no whiter and my hair no thicker after three and a bit weeks on the stuff. Maybe you can exist on Soylent, but I wouldn’t call it living.

Could you live off Soylent for a month?

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