Liquid Glop is the Future of Food
Who knew a coma-like feeding could be a multi-million dollar business?
A 2018 study by Oxford Economics found that the more we eat together, the happier we’re likely to be. So regularly eating alone is more strongly associated with unhappiness than any other factor apart from mental illness.1
Our brains are wired to get satisfaction from manual tasks such as mending or building things. It’s a highly rewarding cognitive effort and is hardly surprising with our human history of co-evolving with tools for the past 3.5 million years. Working with our hands is as innate to us as thinking with our minds. Our most reliable joy after socializing and eating is making things. So cooking, for me at least ticks this box in part.
Soylent
I found an ugly combination of a computer programmer who hacked food. Maybe another name might be better fitting instead of food, an optimized meal sounds like something the 25-year-old Rob Rheinhart would agree when he invented Soylent in 2013. An invention of a gloopy white substance that looks and tastes like pancake batter.
Rob is a programmer who failed to create a start-up along with two other collaborators to create cheap and modern cell towers. He moved on to another problem he found which was food. For Rob food was an absolute waste of time. He claimed it took too much time from his day. From the shopping, cooking, and cleaning up, and found this equation of inefficient preparation needed a solution.
He thought to take all the needed nutrients and turn them into a liquid called Soylent. His preparing a meal at home became an eliminated hassle.
After researching and nutrient hacking his way, he created his first batch of Soylent. All the while Rob was blogging about his meal replacement creation, the programmer community was delighted with his initial post and passed the idea on to further hacker sites. Rob’s crowdfunding campaign aimed to transform Soylent into a marketable product and reached its goal within two hours. Soylent is a programmer’s dream of efficiency and one of their mottos is ‘We hacked food.’
Huel
In 2014 a UK-based company launched with the creepy name combination of ‘Human’ and ‘Fuel’ and came up with Huel. Yet another convenient meal replacement which is made out of oats, peas, rice, and protein. Huel comes in powder form and needs to be mixed with 500ml of water and your human feed is good to go.
Huel boasts on their ‘About’ page, “With the global population predicted to reach 9.7 billion by 2050, our current food production methods are often outdated and unsustainable, not to mention unethical.”
Ok, a couple of points go to the marketing team for that one. They continue, “We are here to change the way people think about food. In short, we need a food that prioritizes nutrition, does not generate lots of waste, and has minimal impact on the environment. But we also need it to be convenient and affordable.”
That word which I truly despise when it comes to food — convenient. That word sounds like a pyramid of tech bros balancing between a fine line between pragmatism or being in denial of their mortality. They don’t stop there but got Idris Elba on board on their internet site to boast about how he’s been a ‘Hueligan’ for years as he was preparing for his role in Thor. Goddammit, not you Idris, not you.
Huel, and Soylent for that matter give me an agonizing look into an office worker’s lunch. Trying to hack their productivity over their keyboard and gulping a ‘convenient and affordable’ glop sounds like something from The Matrix, or being in a coma. Sadly, I see this as a huge potential and further profits siphoned from productivity geeks, office workers, programmers, commuters, construction workers, or anyone else trying to save time spent eating.
To make something with our hands, like a cooked meal for ourselves is a form of self-respect and understandably misery for some. Of course, it can be a hassle, and inconvenient. It can also become fun to cook for others, and it’s proven that when we eat together we’ll be happier. You deserve better than slurping gloop under hospital lights in your office.
We don’t need the bombardment of ads that scream convenience. These ads make life feel as if it isn’t your own, as if something is trying to hack your behavior into believing this is what you need. The subliminal messages tricking you into triggering your insecurities that echo the suspicions of your inadequacies.
Maybe the question to yourself should be, is cooking for yourself good enough for you? A process that allows you to disconnect from a world that wants you to be fragile, insecure, and overwhelmed with choice, maybe a choice not necessarily yours.
What if your sense of self took the reins of your kitchen? Even though it could feel like work, it is something done on your terms and for something you believe in and hopefully stand for. That is what I call convenient.
Huel-y yours,
The Greasy Pen.
https://www.about.sainsburys.co.uk/~/media/Files/S/Sainsburys/living-well-index/sainsburys-living-well-index-sep-2018.pdf