Wall-E Shocks of the future? Image: Pixar/ Disney. GIF: Jennifer Fox
At this year’s SXSW in Austin, Texas, we visited a panel entitled “The Future of Food Processing.” It consisted of four very healthy-looking young men in expensive-looking casual outfits– something you could just as easily wear to a business meeting as to an indoor climbing gym, for example.
They are the four forerunners of the inventions of the 21st century that, if these men have their way, will reduce our dependence on gastronomic pleasures like soft scrambled eggs And Steak. They each represented plant protein–based on eggs, Soylent (a powder that contains the nutrients of a meal), “steak chips” and “Beyond Meat” (“the first plant protein that looks, feels, tastes and behaves like meat”). The quartet’s conversation revolved around efficiency and innovation: They talked about noble goals like alleviating world hunger with their products. The inventor of synthetic egg explained that, unlike the humble egg itself, his product will improve over time. Like iPhones, he explained, his “egg” will come to market in various improved versions, unlike the egg, which stays the same and has never improved.
The word that wasn’t mentioned during the panel was “pleasure,” and that’s exactly the theme that the New York Times picked up this week. Soylent, a phenomenon Lizzie Widdicombe from the New Yorker released a few weeks ago has been making headlines in a big way. The appeal? Visit the website and a bespectacled, muscular man is pouring Soylent into a glass, with the words “What if you never had to worry about food again?” For $85, you can buy seven pouches (for 21 meals) of the stuff, which works out to about $4 per meal. You mix the powder with water and boom. You don’t need meals anymore.
The Times article features a video of a gastroenterologist, a nutritionist, a sommelier and a personal trainer tasting the concoction, which some have compared to “my grandfather’s Metamucil.” All four found it underwhelming. It “tastes like sand,” the gastroenterologist said. “It tastes very healthy … and it smells like cardboard,” the sommelier said. “No normal person would really want to drink that.”
Restaurant reporter Julia Moskin It was thought that the powder could be shipped to hurricane and other disaster areas and thus be a potential “blessing to humanity.” But the Times author Farhad Manjoowho lived mostly on Soylent for a week and a half, declares that “everything about Soylent screams function, not fun” and considers it “the most joyless new technology the world has seen since we first saw MS-DOS.” Ouch.
He continues: “The developers of Soylent forgot a basic ingredient that is present in successful technology products and, of course, in most good foods. That ingredient is pleasure.” Are technological advances making food irrelevant? Many people seem to like replacing the variety of their daily calorie intake – from Thai food to German food, from soup to nuts – with something that provides all the basic nutrients but doesn’t expend energy on creative or appetizing choices. The New Yorker writer visited ten students clutching “water bottles filled with beige slime.” A computer science student told the reporter: “It keeps you full for five hours. It’s good for studying.”
If food is indeed meant to be fuel and not pleasure, the world of Soylent is certainly an effective one. But some of us see food as a window to learning about cultures except our own, as a tremendous source of joy and even one of the main reasons why life is wonderful.
And you?
