so says eff: Soylent

I know what you're thinking (not really, but it's a nice hook).

Soylent.

Um...what?

There was a movie once, "Soylent Green", about "a dystopian future of dying oceans and year-round humidity due to the greenhouse effect, resulting in suffering from pollution, poverty, overpopulation, euthanasia and depleted resources." So says Wiki-The-Pedia.

Anyway, cut to the chase. The movie's protagonist "boards a human disposal truck to the disposal center, where he sees the human corpses converted into Soylent Green." Yep. What they eat. But this ain't that. This here is just "Soylent". It's food too, but won't make you gag, and doesn't contain toenails or pubic hairs.

Soylent is actual food, or "food replacement" if you prefer that term: "20 grams of protein, slow-burning carbs, 21 grams of fats, 26 vitamins + minerals". Etc.

There is stuff in it. How it works is you eat the stuff. Then you do things. Whatever you want.

Soylent was created by a guy who decided that he spent too much time buying, preparing, cooking, eating, and cleaning up food.

I first read about it several years before it became a product. I don't remember when. The oldest mention I can find is six years ago, but it was before that. I've always been curious. Last summer was my chance.

I'm more or less living outside the U.S. these days, so I had to wait until I was back there earlier this year.

First Soylent was an idea, then a proto-product, then a product that could be bought only by subscription, and it was too expensive to bother with, and then along came Soylent 2, but I wasn't in the U.S. so I couldn't buy it, and then eventually everything seemed to click: I was in the U.S., the product was available for a reasonable price, on a one-time order basis, and I wanted to see if it might work as a backpacking food, so I bought some. I bought one order of seven pouches of powder, said to be 35 meals, said to work out to $1.82 per meal. The "original flavor" is sort of vanilla-ish. That's what I got.

I tried it. It works for me. If I ever go backpacking again, I'm going to use it.

Previously, my big meal of the day was a four-serving pouch of instant mashed potatoes, to which I added half a stick of butter, a half-cup of powdered milk, about four tablespoons of parmesan cheese, and hot water. It was good.

Soylent is better.

I prepared my Soylent about the same way, but used powdered butter, now available from Walmart, and no cheese. Soylent is mildly sweet, but I don't know how much of that taste is from actual sugar and how much is from sucralose, a non-food sweetener. I can say that even if all the sweet flavor is from actual sugar, it isn't all that sweet, and it never bothered me. If all the sweetness is from sucralose, I didn't notice any of the usual creepy-nasty aftertaste.

Officially, there were five meals possible from a pouch of powder but I decided that three meals from each pouch was right. With enough butter, that would be about the right amount of energy for a main backpacking meal, and the volume was reasonable. I never felt upset after eating Soylent, or got hungry too soon, had gas or any other problems. For me, in fact, the effects were completely agreeable. I slurped it down and got on with things. Even the type and amount of fiber in Soylent were just exactly perfect for me: once a day, in the morning, nice and solid and clean.

I've read about several people who claim they've lived on nothing but Soylent for over a year at a time, but I wouldn't want to. It's too expensive for my taste, and too limiting. I don't need much variety but more than what a sort of gritty sweetish liquid provides. No complaints though. This stuff is full of vitamins and minerals, tastes good, goes down easily and quickly, can be made either cold or hot (though if you add real butter to it, you'll want to use hot water so the butter melts).

Soylent is also relatively cheap. The way I ate it, three meals per pouch instead of five, the base cost went up from the official $1.82 to $3, plus whatever the powdered milk and butter added. Let's say $4 per meal as an upper limit. That's pretty high for me, but low enough to be reasonable, especially if the rest of my food for a given backpacking day came in at $1 to $2 — maybe $5 to $6 a day, tops, living fairly high on the hog for me.

Various people publish ideas about what they eat/have eaten, and they usually scare the snot out of me. For example, a couple who have been going stoveless for 20 years say that they eat this sort of thing on a daily basis:

cheese
meat
tuna
crackers, crunchy things
cookies
tang/lemonade mix
nuts
dry fruit
mumble bars
dark chocolate

The total weight is 24 ounces (680 g), which is good. The total caloric content is 3000, which seems low. (Pet peeve: calories don't actually exist — they are determined based on burning food in oxygen, which has no relationship to biochemical metabolism, except that both are called "oxidation". I go by heft, and volume, and type of foodstuff — i.e., educated guesswork, which is what you have to do anyway even if you use calories.)

Note that "mumble bars" means "Clif, Luna, NuGo, Zone Perfect, ProBar or similar". Check the ingredients some day. Most or all of these are 30% to 40% sugar. Not good in any way. These people must spend $15 to $20 a day on food, per person, and with the cookies and lemonade and chocolate and fruit, they're eating a gigantic amount of sugar as well.

And there are others, like these people who must spend at least that much if not more, using tiny packages of expensive nut butters and similar boutique foods. Lots of packaging waste to deal with too. Doing the Colorado Trail, according to their figures, they spent a total of $2/mile or $23/day on trail food, although some of their food was donated, so the actual cost was higher. Given even today's prices it should be possible to travel for half that, or even a third of that, with some care. And for a solo traveler, cut that in half once more.

A lot of people seem to eat huge quantities of nuts, seeds, and dried fruits. I can't handle much of them. They don't digest well, only tending to wave bye-bye on their way out, which comes all to soon.

I need cheese, meat, or eggs, food I can handle gracefully, or if not those, then food that's been powdered. Cheese, meat, and eggs don't carry well, and they're not cheap, so I usually rely on powdered milk for protein and butter for fat, and whatever filler works.

Homemade peanut butter brownies are good (flour, butter, peanut butter, powdered milk, cocoa). Shortbread (butter, flour, and sugar) is acceptable. Quick-cook oatmeal works for some meals (oats, powdered milk, butter, raisins), as does instant mashed potatoes (potato powder, powdered milk, butter, parmesan cheese).

Anything that can serve as a vehicle for peanut butter or butter and powdered milk is great.

Soylent should be even better, because someone has already taken raw ingredients and intelligently blended them into a balanced meal. I would just need to bulk it up a bit with a little more of what I like, and the whole deal would be taken care of. Beyond the main course, I'd need only some little treats like tea, hard candy, raisins, maybe crushed potato chips or crushed nacho cheese chips or crushed cheesy crackers for lunch.

I'll definitely give Soylent a good trial if I ever get into backpacking again. Definitely.

Next post on this subject: Soylent Again, Etc

More info (in no particular order):

The Man Who Would Make Food Obsolete

How Healthy Is Soylent?

My Year with Soylent

Silicon Valley Is Hacking Your Food

Soylent: What Happened When I Stopped Eating For 2 Weeks

Ars does Soylent, the finale: Soylent dreams for people

Reg hack prepares to live off wondergloop Soylent

Soylent: What Happened When I Went 30 Days Without Food

Soylent gets tested, scores a surprisingly wholesome nutritional label