Back in 2012, Rob Rhinehart was just a young man living in a small apartment, trying to find his path in the city of San Francisco. At the time, he was part of a team working on the development of a bold software, hence they didn’t had neither the time nor the money to feed themselves as they should have. After trying various cheap diets (pizza, McDonald), he decided to give up on conventional food completely. Being a student at Georgia Tech, he looked at the problem from the engineer’s point of view. So, by stripping all the foods down to their main elements, he concluded that he can create a special liquid that will offer all the necessary nutrients needed by a normal human body. Rob called his synthetic food product Soylent, inspired by the title of the movie Soylent Green, in which the people of the future will no longer have access to food and they will eat only small nutritious waffles.
The young man studied a lot of books on nutrition and he observed that the human body does not really need vegetables and fruits in order to function properly. Instead, the body will be just fine with the right dose of vitamins, minerals and carbohydrates. Thus, Rhinehart ordered all of these basic substances (the list consisted in 35 nutrients) in the form of powders or pills and he mixed them together in the blender, creating a liquid substance that resembles the lemonade. Later on, he shared the results of his experiment on his blog. If you do have the time to read the entire article, you will notice that he has a subjective tone and that he’s very proud of his finding. Also, he says that his Soylent compound is just delicious and that it boosted his body shape, his skin is cleaner, he has whiter teeth and his hair is healthier than ever.
At this time, Rob and his friends gave up on their previous software project and they are fully focusing on the development of their new synthetic food product, the Soylent. Last week, the first 1,000 pieces of Soylent were sold in the United States, and many companies began to sponsor the project. Would you buy such a synthetic food product?
