The psychology of Soylent and the prison of first-world food choices

(credit: Aurich Lawson / Lee Hutchinson / Thinkstock)

Back around Labor Day 2013, Senior Editor Lee Hutchinson passed on the various grilled and barbecue delights of a holiday weekend. Instead, he spent seven days testing a peculiar new nutritional meal substitute—Soylent. The product has only grown in notoriety and evolved in its composition since. This long weekend, we’re resurfacing Hutchinson’s reflection from several months after that initial experience (originally published in May 2014). If interested in some of our Soylent coverage since then, here are a few highlights:

I’ve spilled a lot of virtual ink on Soylent over the past year—I count thirteen pieces, including the five-day experiment from last summer when I ate nothing but the stuff for a full week. This, though, is probably the last Soylent-specific piece that I’ll write for a while. It’s the piece that I’ve wanted to do all along.

Here we’re going to talk about how the final mass-produced Soylent product fits into my life, without any stunts or multi-day binges. More importantly, we’re going to take a look at exactly what might drive someone in the most food-saturated culture in the world to bypass thousands of healthy, normal, human-food meal choices in favor of nutritive goop. It’s something a lot of folks simply can’t seem to wrap their heads around. Today it’s relatively easy to make a healthy meal, so why in the hell would anyone pour Soylent down their throat?