10 thoughts from 1 year on meal replacement (aka soylent)

Do you remember that scene from The Matrix where a recently unplugged Neo joins his new teammates for lunch? The one where they are eating some shapeless, semi-transparent thing debating whether the nutrition makes up for the disappointment?

Was that scene meant to picture the misery of mankind? What I thought as a kid was ‘how awesome, wish that was possible’. It has been nearly 20 years since that scene hit the silver screen and things have changed a bit…

In this article I would like to introduce you to the idea of meal replacement which I will refer to as “soylent” or “powder” for brevity. I will also share some thoughts and observations from using soylent for nearly a year as the dominant component of my diet. At the same time I will not be mentioning any specific brands of soylent in order to focus on meal replacement as a general idea.

1. What is soylent?

Essentially, it’s just a powdered food which is meant to have ingredients in the exact proportion to satisfy all nutritional needs of the human body (providing right intake). The idea is that it is sufficient to eat this type of food mixed with water as a replacement to “regular food”. Only this. All the time.

One type of food instead of all others? How crazy/dangerous/unreasonable/radical that is!

Shocking idea? I personally don’t think that professionally engineered meal is any more shocking than random combination of supermarket products, unbalanced intakes of micro- and macro-elements and/or chronic overdose of carbohydrates, fats and salts.

2. Why would one consider soylent at all?

Efficiency. That’s the one-word answer. To elaborate:

• Health reasons - The fact that one’s body is able to tolerate all of the mistreatment it may be receiving doesn’t mean it will always be like that. Aside from scary future visions of increased rate of body degradation there are more immediate applications of soylent in weight control. Soylent also incorporates all the benefits of not eating meat.

• Time efficiency - as I explain further using soylent rather than searching for or preparing a meal can yield tangible time savings in preparation, cleaning and purchasing.

• Convenience - soylent is generally easier to store and acquire because of its compact, powdered form. Ideal for not-leaving-home eating and scarce supermarket visits.

• Energy efficiency - starting with the inefficient use energy for personal cooking, or cooking at a restaurant, ending with per-food-type production process energy cost

• Ecological impact - as world has nearly 8 billion people who need to eat, and therefore cook, all energetical costs associated with food production and food preparation have major impact on emissions and by extension global warming. Soylent is made of low-emission food products and requires little of the manual inefficiency inherent to end-user preparation.

• Waste production - soylent as a product is by design well suited for industrial-scale production. Because of its compact form, it can be efficiently packed in large quantities, reducing the amount of shipping and packaging materials.

• Moral reasons - this of course will not resonate with every person, while I already touched on environmental responsibility above: soylent is additionally vegan by design. If you were ever concerned by breeding animals for slaughter or how they are treated while being raised, soylent solves the problem by using vegan food components only.

3. White mouse profile

Starting with disclaimer: I am not a dietitian or any other food/fitness/medical professional. Whatever I wrote here is an outcome of personal “experiment” on my own body. It may or may not apply to you. As with medical adverts - discuss with appropriate professional before embracing any of presented ideas. Responsibility is entirely up to you.

Now bit on my physical profile: I am male, 29 years old, 59±2kg weight, 175cm tall (BMI normal, low end). I do 40 min of exercises (callisthenics) every 2 days. My kcal intake ranges between 2000-2200 per day. I don’t have any known health issues and sleep 8 hours at regular time every day. I am a non-smoker, and avoid  alcohol, drugs (painkillers etc.) or any other artificially designed substances.

4. Quantitative heaven

If you are a quantitative-oriented person soylent will resonate well with you. Taking the same thing everyday and repeating activities in the same way (cleaning, etc.) makes it really easy to assess:

• How much you eat of each type of product in volume or mass

• How much money you spend on food every month/year

• How much time goes into buying products and cleaning

• How much waste you generate

For me answers go something like:

Per day I eat at least 350g of soylent, 2 apples, 1 banana, 500g of plain, dense yogurt. Putting it at a scale of a month: 60 apples (15kg), 30 bananas (7.5kg), 15kg of yogurt and 10kg of soylent. You can easily scale that up to 1 year or a lifetime for a person or population.

Living in London, UK I spend under 180 GBP for food per month - 67% of cost is soylent, rest is fruits and yogurt. That of course doesn’t take into account any incidentals.

Buying things locally takes me 30 minutes door-to-door. I do it 5 times a month. Preparation and cleaning takes me 30 minutes everyday (blender clean up after 3rd meal of the day etc). That is, I spend 15 hours cleaning/preparing every month (1 day by wake time!) and 2.5 hours shopping for food.

All fruit waste is biodegradable, so I won’t elaborate on that. I use reusable fabric-made bags for shopping. Unfortunately I generate 1 yogurt cup per day and since soylent I buy comes in 1.75 kg plastic bags I contribute 5-6 such bags per month.

5. Accidental vegetarian

There are few commonly mentioned downsides of eating meat:

• high emissions due to breeding cattle,

• moral issues of raising animals to kill and the questionable conditions in which they are kept,

• simple well-being issues of digestion impact, high fats/kcal intake or even impeding dental hygiene due to tissues getting stuck in between teeth.

Like many cultures, the local cuisine I grew up with is highly meat-oriented. It can be hard to imagine life without something that has always been with you, especially because  the first dietary choices were made for you before you were able to reasonably question them. The feasibility of diet is therefore somewhat temporally and culturally sensitive, although there is no better place for reshaping those choices than the modern “First World”.

With soylent, [stochastic] vegetarianism came easy for me. All other things involved really took away my attention from the fact I am becoming a vegetarian. It’s a bit of a coincidence I am thankful for.

Isn’t soylent vegan by design? It is, but since I am using yogurt so unfortunately I cannot call myself vegan at the moment. If you are able to go powder-water only then you would automatically become vegan. I feel need to mix up powder with yogurt and fruits for couple of reasons:

• Shrinking volume of consumed liquid food

• Reducing number of meals - from pure-powder 4-5 to 3 when mixed

• Feeling of being full

• Counterbalancing  energy-deficient design of soylent I am buying

Dense yogurt I buy helps me accomplish all of the above goals. Plain yogurt of course - no need for more sugars or additional flavors aside from fruits and powder. Adding yogurt feels like adding weight to the meal, without sabotaging nutritious balance too much. Better quality dairy products tend to contain lots of protein, proper energy balance, etc. Luckily, out of all animal-derived products, milk has lowest carbon footprint (discussed later in more detail).

It is perhaps worth highlighting that soylent can be mixed with any other edible product. After all it is just made from few plain food components (see point 9 for more details). Of course many of possible combinations have potential for defeating the purpose of soylent. I would be also cautious with heating it up: I have no idea how that would impact its nutritional valorous.

6. Post-conversion consequences

My diet is 60% soylent, the rest being  fruits and diary. Still pretty lightweight and regular, but I do occasionally hang out with friends for a meal, and even more occasionally - eat meat.

Despite nearly 1 year on soylent and warnings from other people, I am healthy and therefore can cope with any food. However, I have observed that I don’t feel particularly well with heavy meats like burgers. Last time I had a burger I felt like falling asleep on the restaurant table after having it. Guess that sort of dish had become  something of a load shock for my digestive system. It’s not end of the world of course, but that day wasn’t my most productive day due to feeling of sleepiness and overall laziness.

I didn’t make note of any other non-obvious impacts. Due to eating soylent I take more water with food that I used before. That accounts for more of toilet visits obviously. Since I do regular exercises I try not to have meals close to the sessions (hungry sessions work better). Otherwise I can feel nauseous or have feeling of liquids moving inside when moving around, but all that applies to ‘regular’ eating as well.

7. Ecological impact

Let’s start with processes: buying, cooking, cleaning. It feels to me fairly clear that whatever chunk of manual labour brought to an industrial scale must yield noticeable increase of overall efficiency due to higher chances of specialisation and automation.

Laziness aside, I still find it reasonable to prefer industrial scale powder production over millions pots and pans, ovens, boiling and roasting people do at their homes. Less cooking, less cleaning. More compact meal components - less effort of buying and less waste produced.

One could assert that waste is not so much of an issue with recycling schemes. I hold a deep belief though that “not doing” is way more economical than “redoing”: I greatly support not generating waste over generating recyclable waste. That would be a topic for another article, but not everything is recyclable, recycling can go wrong in dozens of ways and there is also footprint to whole of recycling process. In the end recycling feels like a solution which would require a closer look before making any judgements on its actual value.

This is perhaps the main point of the show: emission from producing and delivering 1 kg of different types of food.  For the first time I will act semi-responsible and bring up a table by www.greeneatz.com. Components of my current diet include entries 10, and 13-16. We can see that obtaining 1kg of rice (as my soylent is partially made from brown rice) is 14 times as energy efficient as first offender: lamb meat (in a holistic view of production process).

How much of emissions is food-related in global scale? According to The Economist 25% of world's carbon dioxide emissions relates to food production. That’s a huge chunk to say the least: much more than I imagined when thinking of heavy industries, overall manufacturing or specifically petroleum industry.

8. New dimension of discrimination

In this article I explicitly refer to my current dietary habits as using soylent and to my past eating habits as “regular” or “normal”. Even this vocabulary is fundamentally biased and discriminating.

I believe issues of food and eating are of fundamental importance to human civilisation as a whole, and I believe soylent is a valiant and viable attempt to address issues with food production and consumption in their entirety. Unfortunately despite being a highly effective alternative it faces the daunting, tough problem of human perception and instinctual, intrinsic hostility towards the idea.

Although soylent may seem like a hipster fashion I couldn’t be any further from considering myself one. I believe it addresses more issues than anything else I have seen so far and its importance seems magnified considering how unlikely it is for human population to shrink or even stabilise in any foreseeable future.

I started experimenting with my eating habits while working for one of previous employers. I used to mix and sip soylent in a common eating room where most of staff gathered at the lunch time. Of course that sight bred curiosity to say the least. All asked and commented, few considered, and fewer took action. One thing that struck me was the need for people to justify themselves why they don’t consider soylent a valid option. Even when they were just introduced to the idea, even though I never tried to “convert” anyone, 80% of cases of engaging in soylent conversation ended with the other person explaining to me why they don’t consider soylent valid for themselves or (luckily rarer) why they don’t consider it a valid idea in general. And all that in an otherwise highly toned environment!

Indeed, since I am in favour of soylent, experiencing same pattern of behaviour over and over again started irritating me after a while. I didn’t find most of attacking arguments as having enough weight to change my mind, but it may be valuable to bring up some.

Usually those were:

• I like eating food/taste diversity
• Soylent is boring
• Eating food is a social activity
• Because

Taste

Well, I won’t even try to match a few powder and fruit flavors against plethora of all possible tastes out there. So far I have seen perhaps 10 flavoured versions of soylent itself. Nevertheless, should really taste diversity dominate a debate when future of your body, whole of your specie as well as shape of the world that future generations will receive is concerned?

Boredom

Okay, so mixing powder with something else potentially for rest of your life may sound bit boring. But this argument does not carry anymore weight than the “taste” one. By the way, no one seems to question Zuckerberg's selection of same type of shirt every day. How efficient one can get picking that one shirt or... choosing that one type of meal?

Socialising

I believe that sipping smoothie is just as social as cutting crispy turkey. It is just a matter of what we are used to...

Because

Of course, we were all indoctrinated to eat “regular” food since little child. Starting with our parents repeating eating habits centuries if not millennia old. I believe it is time to reconsider our approaches in food despite all the tradition. There are more of us than ever before and the planet’s resources are finite, with hard limits approaching faster than ever before with each additional baby born.

9. Make or buy?

I have never made soylent, I always buy it. The notion of making it has some opportunities, but I don’t believe it’s a trivial task. Briefly sketching what would be involved:

Comprehensive dietary knowledge - you would need to know how to avoid hurting yourself by missing important aspects of diet. From what I remember of early schooling, some vitamins are absorbed only when dissolved in fats, while others are just digestible with water - that was the explanation of the vegetarian bane of my childhood. There are potentially more problems like that, so you better know what you are doing. Doctor Google may be of some help of course, but you better be sure to verify the information you find. It’s your health at stake.

Okay, so let's say you know all you need and you can buy all the ingredients from somewhere. You probably have something like oats, peas, brown rice, flax-seeds, and some powders with vitamins, protein and other required elements (again, that’s very coarse). Then, you need to somehow make the powder. A regular blender probably wouldn’t deal with the task: it’s one thing to mix up some fruits and yogurt with trace of powder and another thing to make the powder. Like with drilling, I would expect the latter case to heat up the blender’s blades beyond what’s acceptable. Creating powdered food would probably involve some sort of professional blender.

Once you went through the pain of engineering your process and investing considerable amount of time you probably become either frustrated or 3rd party powder-independent. In the latter case there would probably be great financial advantage of making your powder much, much cheaper plus very fine grained control what gets into the pot.

I know some people who claimed to make soylent and they are fine and healthy, but that feels a bit too much commitment to me. There are also certain benefits of leaving it to industrial scale production as discussed earlier.

10. Soylent’s viability

Soylent has still long way to go though. As a commercial product it seems to be overpriced. My choice of soylent is not purchasable at regular shops and available only in very few selected countries. I am also highly bothered with unnecessary, not recyclable waste I am generating that could be reduced if there was better choice of packing and/or sizes.

Of course, soylent companies use lots of the motivation presented here in their marketing, but they ultimately are driven by profit and are likely to overstep boundaries whenever profitable to do so. A potential example of that is introducing liquid soylent. Even worse: some  manufacturers consider plastic containers fit for the job. The counter argument is that liquid form may introduce more people to powder. Data would tell, but unfortunately I am not aware of any credible sources. Personally I would prefer reducing packaging per kcal rather than doing otherwise.

Finally, I believe that one of the biggest challenges in soylent adoption is the biased perception of what is a valid form of food and what is not, together with a lack of will to make a compromise against one’s established preferences. In the former case there is some room for improvement though, which is partially why I wrote this article.

Thanks a lot for reading.