I love food, enough said! Or is it?

As it turns out, what I really enjoy is eating good food, trying new food, discovering new places in the search for food, and spending time socializing over food. Everything else I could pretty much pass on. I’d rather be cooked for than cook. I’d rather have my groceries delivered than go and source them myself. In fact, everything that goes into sourcing, procuring, and preparing food I could pretty much pass on if I always had my way.

Because of that I may not always make the best food choices. I’ll replace breakfast with coffee or herbal tea because I’m running out the door. I’ll eat out almost every day for lunch instead of preparing a lunch. At some point, I even did the math and realized it’s more cost effective for me to eat out at night because of the large amounts of food that gets wasted when I cook for just myself.

Enter Soylent – Food of the future

Soylent markets as “Simple, healthy, affordable food” and for about $3 USD a serving it basically contains 20% of your daily recommended intake of everything. While initial fanfare made Soylent out to be the replacement for all food, the company that manufactures the commercial product does now market that “While not intended to replace every meal, Soylent can replace any meal.”

I could try to explain more about the product itself, but the company website and the video below will probably do a much better job.

It tastes like watery pizza dough

My first Soylent encounter was with powered version 1.5. Mixed with water it tasted like drinking watery pizza dough. Despite using a blender ball or trying to blend it with some fruit it would never fully dissolve into the water and was always chalky and a little clumpy. Nonetheless it was a filling meal.

I tried using it as a breakfast substitute and would prepare a shaker at night so it could be quickly filled with water for a grab and go meal in the morning. This worked well for a while but I eventually ran out and didn’t feel like buying another seven bags of chalky meal replacement.

Soylent 2.0

This newest version takes absolutely all the effort out of getting ready to eat food. Packaged in convenient bottles, Soylent 2.0 is a liquid form of the meal replacement sold in packs of 12 x 400 kcal bottles. Just pull the flaps off the box, place it in the fridge and you’ve got 12 nutritionally complete meals ready to go.

Now I’ve got no excuse to miss breakfast. So I’ve drank breakfast every day for the past month. A huge improvement over my years of coffee for breakfast. Since i previously ate out every day for lunch at a daily cost of $10-$15, I’ve been able to dramatically reduce my weekly food cost. I still haven’t replaced all food and typically eat a solid dinner, however my overall daily food balance has shifted dramatically.

Soylent may not be as good for me as eating a full meal of fresh foods for every meal, or maybe it is. But either way, that goal’s not attainable for me with my current lifestyle. So drinking a significant portion of my food is a huge improvement for health and my finances.

Not sure where this will go, but maybe there’s a 30 day experiment in my future.

Image: Soylent_2.0_2016 – Dllu – CC BY-SA 4.0