Soylent - The Liquid Food

Since mid-January, Rob Rhinehart has eaten very little of what most people would consider real food. At times, he’s gone nearly a month between meals. Instead, the 25-year-old electrical engineer from San Francisco has survived almost entirely on Soylent, a nutrient-packed drink he manufactures in his kitchen. To Rhinehart and a growing legion of followers, the cloudy, white liquid is a substantial step toward changing how humans eat—or don’t.

Our physiological dependence on food has blossomed into an almost sacred attachment, subdivided into countless cultural, commercial, and aesthetic variations. But food is only fuel. And that fuel costs time and money. Last summer, Rhinehart found himself broke in San Francisco. He’d moved there after graduating from Georgia Tech to start a wireless-communications company. It failed, and he was left subsisting on the cheapest diet possible: ramen noodles and Costco corn dogs. He says he and his roommates began taking supplements to ward off scurvy. “I was unhealthy, hated cooking, shopping, and cleaning, and my only major expenditure was food,” Rhinehart says. Rather than suffer the thrice-daily burden of cooking, eating, and cleaning up, he decided instead to streamline his food intake.

For three months, Rhinehart pored over pirated textbooks, learning what he could about biochemistry and nutrition. He assembled a list of ingredients—mostly chemicals—that would provide everything he needed to survive: whey isolate for protein; maltodextrin for carbs; even micronutrients like zinc and chromium. He began ordering them from food-additive and chemical suppliers on Amazon and eBay. Soon he had a kitchen full of powders ready for mixing.

There are plenty of products that can take the place of a normal meal, but those drinks are not meant as complete food replacements; in the long run, they are expensive and unhealthy. Done properly, though, liquid diets are feasible. In 1965, the National Institutes of Health used California inmates in a 19-week experiment to test whether astronauts could live on a liquid diet. The prisoners wound up happier and healthier (rumor is, the astronauts objected to the lack of flavor).

On January 12, Rhinehart measured each of his ingredients on a scale, dumped them into a pitcher, and added water. “I watched my life flash before my eyes,” he says, “and chugged.” He quickly realized he’d forgotten to include fiber, which helps regulate absorption; while he felt great after immediately metabolizing 800 calories, he soon crashed, feeling exhausted and out of it. After a few adjustments and a brief bout of potassium poisoning (which left Rhinehart with heart palpitations), he created a working formula. He went a month, then two, then three, ingesting almost nothing but Soylent, a name he came up with as a nod to the 1970s science-fiction film Soylent Green. He consumed three or four liquid meals a day, each of which took about a minute to prepare, drink, and clean up. To make sure he was healthy, he got occasional blood tests, and he tracked his progress on his blog, Mostly Harmless. There, he noted changes to the formula, such as replacing one third of the maltodextrin with oat powder in order to get more fiber and a lower glycemic index. He also began recording changes to his life.

Not buying food and not cooking saves him a lot of time and money. The raw materials in the 2,692 calories per day he drinks cost him only $154.82 per month, as opposed to the $500 he says he used to spend on solid food. Rhinehart also credits Soylent with a marked increase in energy, clearer skin, and less dandruff. While documenting his progress, he has gained a following.

The response to Soylent has been mixed, mostly because it causes people to so deeply question the nature of food and their relationship to it. That has prompted some to lash out at Rhinehart. “Have fun dying of cancer,” one person wrote. Nutritionists, too, are skeptical. According to Joy Dubost, a dietitian and spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, “Everything we eat is a chemical, so in that sense, I don’t have a problem with it. What I do have a problem with is his one-size-fits-all approach to nutrition. There’s no scientific evidence that indicates it’s going to do what he says it will do.” Also, Dubost says, “I’ve tried it, and it tastes terrible.”

Yet, for every anti-Soylent response, Rhinehart has received one in favor of it. These “reverse foodies,” as a few of his fans call themselves, are driven by the same frustration over food and its constraints. They include people like Daniel Dow, a 27-year-old chemistry and math teacher in central Indiana who has spent the past few months happily eating almost nothing but a Soylent imitation he began making once Rhinehart posted his formulas online.

Reverse foodies like Dow won’t have to subsist on their own for too long. In May, Rhinehart and three friends started an online crowdfunding campaign to raise $100,000, with the goal of mass-producing Soylent. They thought they’d need a month. Instead, they raised the money in two hours. At press time, the total was nearly $600,000, and donations were still coming in.

In an ideal world, Rhinehart says, he would like to make enough off Soylent sales to subsidize it for poor and famine-ridden regions overseas. He would also like to supply some big customers. While he won’t specify which branch, Rhinehart says the U.S. military is interested in providing Soylent to soldiers. What he wants most of all, though, is to change the perception of what does and does not constitute food—a line he blurs every time he sits down to eat.

SELECTED INGREDIENTS*
(*Rhinehart does not publish his complete formula, and he updates it frequently. For news, visit robrhinehart.com.)
+ Maltodextrin (250g) for carbs
+ Oat powder (125g) for carbs and fiber
+ Whey isolate (60g) for protein
+ Medium-chain triglycerides (65g) for fats
+ Potassium gluconate (27g) for electrolytes
+ Calcium carbonate (2.5g) for bone density
+ Lycopene (500mcg) for antioxidants
+ Sodium chloride (5.8g) for electrolytes
+ Copper (2mg) for collagen formation
+ Vanadium (100mcg) for glucose regulation

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Software isn't eating your lunch…not just yet. But you've probably heard that a 24-year-old programmer who went through Y Combinator, Paul Graham's prestigious start-up bootcamp, is trying to prove humans don't need traditional food--you know, that texture-rich, tasty solid-form stuff that was or is a living organism--to survive.

Instead, he's proposing, based on his own rigorous and fairly risky self-assessment, that ingesting an inexpensive, precise mix of all essential nutrients in the form of powder mixed with water, can be sustainable. It might be cheaper and easier to produce than food, too--and it might actually make humans healthier.

His name is Rob Rhinehart, and he's co-founder of Soylent, the Oakland-based company that makes a powdered food product of the same name. (If you're getting creeped out thinking about the 1973 film Soylent Green, with Charlton Heston, hold that thought a moment. I asked Rhinehart about it in an interview, notes from which follow.)

Rhinehart's YC days last summer were spent building an entirely different company. Graham reportedly called it the "biggest pivot in YC history" when Rhinehart, whose start-up team was working around the clock to build inexpensive wireless networks for developing countries, decided to instead focus on finding a more efficient way to stay nourished. Here's how Rhinehart told me it happened:

We did demo day after YC that summer and we met with a bunch of investors, and they all said it was just too expensive to do this sort of infrastructure sort of thing. It just didn't get very far. I sort of plotted out our runway. We had a certain amount of money, and you include all of your expenses, and see how long that's going to last you to live. This is our rent, and this is our food. And I thought, this is interesting. What if I didn't need food to live? That would increase our runway.
So he embarked on research on essential nutrients for humans, purchased FDA-approved versions of each, and consulted the National Institute for Medicine for daily recommended doses of each. Then he decided to become his own guinea pig, ingesting solely this powder concoction composed largely of carbs, amino acids, fiber, and vitamins.

"I didn't really expect it to work for very long. The first couple days, I was like, 'well, I'm still alive,'" he says. "It was sort of like I was pushing off shore. After three days or so, it was strange realizing there was no food in my system and I was subsisting entirely on chemicals. But I felt fantastic. I felt euphoric. I felt full of energy."

Rhinehart had his blood tested, half-anticipating a deficiency in some nutrient, but found none. He's still in testing phase, going on five months on Soylent, with very occasional solid meals. He's launched Soylent into a full-blown company with a crowdfunding round, and a few dozen new guinea pigs--some of whom are also testing their blood for signs of trouble, and posting results online. Plenty of them are Silicon Valley types. Some are journalists.

It was at the office of YC partner Garry Tan that I first encountered Rhinehart's concoction. Tan is enthusiastic about it--he ordered an early supply through Soylent's crowdfunding campaign. So has Alexis Ohanian, YC's "ambassador to the east" who recently posted an Instagram photo of himself drinking the concoction, with the note, "Cheers to you, future of food!" (although perhaps what's most notable here is his less-than-enthusiastic expression).

To be clear, Rhinehart isn't proposing a counterargument to food-history author Michael Pollan's rough dietary guideline: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." He says there's nothing wrong with enjoying a meal, you know, per se. It's just not always an efficient use of time or energy, which irked his engineering-school sensibilities.

"I really enjoy working, I just don't like doing repetitive things or redundant things. I don't like going to the grocery store for the same things and waiting in line and cooking and cleaning over and over. It was really frustrating for me," he says.

He told Vice he's sticking with his largely liquid diet--at least for now: "Soylent is definitely a permanent part of my diet. Right now I only eat one or two conventional meals a week, but if I had any money or a girlfriend, I would probably eat out more often. I'm quite happy with my bachelor chow. I don't miss the rotary telephone, and I don't miss food."

He says he has a lengthy list of things he doesn't miss, including grocery shopping, dishes, arguments with his roommates about dishes, tedious conversations about the merits of veganism and gluten-free diets (Soylent is both), napkins, crumbs on his laptop, and morning breath.

Morning breath?

"Because that comes from the bacteria you eat interacting with your stomach acids," he says. "This also means no indigestion."

Soylent contains no bacteria, is shelf-stable, and could be useful for stockpiling for disaster relief, or for supplying to malnourished communities in developing areas of the world. But for now, Soylent is a burgeoning meta-start-up--that is, it caters largely to other start-up community folks in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The appeal of "disrupting food" is huge, precisely because it's so difficult to wrap your brain around.

There are a couple massive questions hanging over Rhinehart's success here, the elephant being, "Is this actually healthy? Is it actually safe?" The Magic-8-Ball version of the answer is "cannot predict now." The Washington Post asked Jay Mirtallo, a professor of pharmacy at Ohio State and a former president of the American Society for Parental Enteral [i.e. feeding tube] Nutrition for analysis. He said: "He basically made medical food. If he wanted to switch to a liquid diet, those are already available."

It's clear for now that Rhinehart has more critics than believers. If you're still curious what more he has to say for his foray into biohacking, here's a bit more of our conversation, edited and condensed.

You're a software engineer by training. How are you learning about nutrition?
I've been reading a lot, talking to experts, and observing people's habits in grocery stores.

Wait, how often are--or were--you stalking around grocery stores?
Probably every other day. I'll just go in and observe what people look at on labels, the kind of products they buy. Once I really understood what the body needed to be healthy it was interesting, like, how things developed naturally to be a balanced diet. Nutrition kind of hobbled along on its own for a long time, and certain behaviors evolved around eating. And it's cultural now. And what I've discovered lately is what an emotional issue it is for a lot of people. As soon as you start talking about it, some people get really defensive about it. I think it's interesting.

It used to be food was life or death. I mean, it still is, no? So it's not so hard to understand why humans defend food and eating.
Our current perception of it might not be aligned with data. There's a huge backlash toward using technology to make food, but I really think that thinking is detrimental. Lots of the other things we make and use are pretty far removed from nature. We process everything, because it makes it more useful; it makes it better. It seems strange we would go almost backwards in terms of the food we consume.

I mean, everyone likes eating, right? And some people like cooking.
No one asks me to make my own pharmaceuticals or car, so why would you ask me to make my own food? I'm bad at it. I have other skills, but that just seems strange that that would be expected of me.

Why confront all of people's defensiveness about processed food with a brand and pitch that's entirely up-playing the sort of laboratory-made nature of this?
Like other food products, where it's made in a factory and it's got a picture of, like, your mom cooking?

What about the fact your name makes people think of the horror movie Soylent Green?
I think it's a pretty stimulating movie (laughs). It's a very thought-provoking film, I think. But I did have the book [Make Room! Make Room!, a 1966 science-fiction novel by Harry Harrison] more in mind. A lot of people have a reaction to the name, but it also gets people thinking about what does "food" actually mean. A lot of people forget that there's nothing special about the chemicals that make up life versus other matter. There's no reason we would need agriculture, plants, or animals to produce food. Because it's really just made out of chemicals. We are positioning ourselves as, "yeah, it is made in a factory. It's good. Everything useful is made in a factory. Food should be no exception." But we really want to be transparent and honest about that.

Forgive me, I'm no scientist. But where can you get Beta Carotete if not from a carrot or a sweet potato or the like?
A lot of them can be synthesized. The plants synthesize them through a series of biochemical reactions. And those can take place easily outside of a life form. You can make all sorts of wonderful healthy things from petroleum. And for electrolytes, they're already often mined. It's just more efficient; the plant was going to extract it from the earth anyways, why don't we just take it straight from the earth? Cut out the middle ground?

Is your primary market right now Silicon Valley?
It did start with a personal need, I mean my diet was pretty poor. I was just a lousy cook. It's really about the nutrition. I just want to be healthy and full. We can cook and eat socially, and that's fun, but most of the time eating is just about nutrition. Initially I wanted to make it a pill. I thought that would be really cool if you could just take a pill. But you just need more mass.

It's that classic question: If you could take a pill and never be hungry again, would you?
But I think for most people it's a spectrum. Some people are really into food, and that's great; for others it's more of a chore. I see food as a form of art--someone who's really skilled at cooking and sourcing foods and cooking recipes, that's interesting to me.

And it's fun.
Well, I have different hobbies. So.

Have you told your mom you're living without food?
I didn't tell my mom until I came home about six weeks into Soylent. She looked at me with new eyes, and said, "what happened to you? You look so healthy!" At first I told her I stopped eating meat, which is something I told a lot of people early on who would say I looked healthier, when I didn't want to explain the whole thing. Which was true. I mean, technically it's vegan. And it's gluten-free. We're really serious about having no allergens or anything; we want this to be a solution for anyone who has any trouble with food allergens.

So my mom was kind of put off initially, but she really came around to the idea because I just looked so healthy to her. Now she's waiting on her batch. I'll test anything on myself, but I wanted to make sure it was totally healthy before giving it to other people.

Is the goal to feed the world?
I see really it as energy. As I walk around Brooklyn this week, and I see people on the subway, people just look tired. They don't have a lot of energy. And that's a very important factor in someone's quality of life and in success. All forms of energy are really the same. The body is in a sense a machine, and if it had better nutrition everyone would be healthier.

So, a supplement? Is there a bigger goal?
I see this as if you could make this ephemeral. You could make it like a utility. In the United States, the way that no one really worries about water, it's just always available, you don't really have to think about it. I mean it does cost something in places, people pay their water bills, but you don't really have to worry about it. That's what I would like food to be.

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Soylent, the seemingly wacky personal experiment of 24-year-old engineer Rob Rhinehart, is maturing into a full-fledged business.

Rhinehart and his team, who were running a Y Combinator-backed startup called Level RF last year, did what Paul Graham has called the “pivot of the century.”

Fascinated by inefficiencies in the industrial food system, Rhinehart designed and then started living off a meal replacement he cheekily named Soylent — after the dystopian movie Soylent Green where Charlton Heston discovers that society has been living off rations made of humans.

This Soylent, thankfully, is not made of humans.

It contains an assortment of carbohydrates, amino acids, proteins and dozens of other vitamins that are deemed medically necessary to for a person to live by the Institute of Medicine, plus other modifications Rhinehart made through the testing process.

“I’d like this to be something that is like coffee — a commodity something that’s available everywhere. Maybe a utility like water and power. Something that is ubiquitous and easy to consume,” he said. “I’d like to see it in grocery and convenience stores soon.”

Now Rhinehart says the company will be closing in on a finalized formula by the end of next month — a version 1.0, if you will. They’ll have a party in late August where they’ll invite press and members of the public. Then the company will gear up to do 140,000 shipments in September with $1 million in pre-orders. It costs roughly $65 a week, including shipping.

Most of the customers are young men, but there have also been a few Doomsday predictors and people preparing for a societal apocalypse that have tried to order lifetime supplies of Soylent, Rhinehart said.

The company has been posting updates of modifications to the Soylent formula, including changing the protein source to a vegan one derived from a rice or pea protein isolate.

“In terms of a new food product, this is much, much larger initial manufacturing run than has happened in the past,” Rhinehart said.

A chance introduction got him in touch with the makers of MuscleMilk, Cytosport, who helped him find an factory in Modesto certified by the NSF. He also started working directly with suppliers; in early versions of Soylent, he would buy components off Amazon or Alibaba.

The taste is pretty bland, kind of malty even. “Soylent is not supposed to be this luxurious thing,” Rhinehart explained.

To be clear, Rhinehart is not necessarily arguing that people should consume only soylent. He’s more of a believer that we don’t really think about or even consciously care about the vast majority of our meals. So instead, his goal is to create a wholly nutritious and inexpensive source of food that he uses for most of his meals. He tries to savor the few non-soylent meals he eats, and says he even appreciates them more as a result.

So is it safe? Well, there are only 50 beta testers at the moment plus Rhinehart’s running journal of his Soylent-based lifestyle.

But all of the components of Soylent are approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Soylent wouldn’t need any kind of additional approval unless there was a new additive of some sort.

“The typical Western diet is pretty easy to beat in terms of nutritional value,” Rhinehart said. “You have to accept the pre-ponderable amount of testing the EFSA (European Food Safety Administration) and the FDA has done on these ingredients. These organizations are very conservative on the quantities of foods that they approve under six-sigma sorts of control.”

At the same time, there are already longstanding meal replacement products out there like Jevity from Abbott Nutrition and Nutren from Nestle, which are targeted at medical patients that can’t consume whole foods or need tube feeding.

So conceptually, medical foods have existed for a long time and they’ve kept patients alive for years. Rhinehart lived solely off Soylent for a month at the beginning of the year, and now he’s probably relying on it for about 80 percent of his intake.

But if you decide to consume it or live primarily off of it, you’re essentially trusting that because the 50 beta testers and Rhinehart haven’t had serious health problems as a result of living off Soylent, you probably won’t either. Because Soylent is also so new, no one has lived off it for years and years either. So nobody fully understands what the consequences of consuming Soylent for years will be.

“No one really worried about me when I had an awful diet of Doritos and fast food. But now that I’ve invented something that’s good for you, everyone is worried about me killing myself,” Rhinehart said. In his month of living entirely off his creation, he claimed his physique improved, his skin cleared, his hair got thicker and his dandruff disappeared.

Rhinehart has five dietitians and medical professionals who work with the company on an advisory basis. He also tests his blood every day for his sugar level and regularly posts panels of tests to his blog to show things like his platelet counts and sodium levels. He tracks everything from how far he can run comfortably to how many hours he sleeps on a regular basis. He’ll also offer a discount to any customers who want to regularly run medical tests on themselves too.

He’s tried to design Soylent from the most elementary level possible with raw minerals and vitamins.

He believes that other previous meal replacement products have fallen short because they mixed together traditional foods, instead of breaking down a person’s daily nutrition needs to their most basic level. Through constant iteration, he’s realized deficiencies in the formula over time. Some joint pain earlier this year led him to add a sulfur source to the mixture.

There is also a very active discussion board on the company’s site where enthusiasts share their own DIY recipes and modifications to the mixture.

“Soylent has taken on a life of its own,” Rhinehart said. “You may have an initial knee-jerk reaction to the name. But when you step back, it allows you to analyze or engage in a reasonable discussion about the nature of food and sustainability.”

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ambrosia said:

Soylent Green is people!!! It's people!!!!

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