The chemical potion, Rhinehart reported, was “delicious! I felt like I’d just had the best breakfast of my life.” Drinking Soylent was saving him time and money: his food costs had dropped from four hundred and seventy dollars a month to fifty. After a month, Rhinehart published the results of his experiment in a blog post, titled “How I Stopped Eating Food.” The post has a “Eureka!” tone. One told me, “It seemed pretty weird.” They kept shopping at Costco. The film ends with the ghastly revelation that Soylent Green is made from human flesh. The movie is set in a dystopian future where, because of overpopulation and pollution, people live on mysterious wafers called Soylent Green. Then, he told me, “I started living on it.” Rhinehart called his potion Soylent, which, for most people, evokes the 1973 science-fiction film “Soylent Green,” starring Charlton Heston. The result, a slurry of chemicals, looked like gooey lemonade. Then, instead of heading to the grocery store, he ordered them off the Internet-mostly in powder or pill form-and poured everything into a blender, with some water. Eventually, Rhinehart compiled a list of thirty-five nutrients required for survival. What if he went straight to the raw chemical components? He took a break from experimenting with software and studied textbooks on nutritional biochemistry and the Web sites of the F.D.A., the U.S.D.A., and the Institute of Medicine. “It just seemed like a system that’s too complex and too expensive and too fragile,” he told me. “You need carbohydrates, not bread.” Fruits and vegetables provide essential vitamins and minerals, but they’re “mostly water.” He began to think that food was an inefficient way of getting what he needed to survive. ![]() “You need amino acids and lipids, not milk itself,” he said. Rhinehart, who is twenty-five, studied electrical engineering at Georgia Tech, and he began to consider food as an engineering problem. But after a week, he said, “I felt like I was going to die.” Kale was all the rage-and cheap-so next he tried an all-kale diet. We had a very small kitchen, and no dishwasher.” He tried out his own version of “Super Size Me,” living on McDonald’s dollar meals and five-dollar pizzas from Little Caesars. ![]() “Food was such a large burden,” he told me recently. Rob Rhinehart, one of the entrepreneurs, began to resent the fact that he had to eat at all. They had been living mostly on ramen, corn dogs, and Costco frozen quesadillas-supplemented by Vitamin C tablets, to stave off scurvy-but the grocery bills were still adding up. As they examined their budget, one big problem remained: food. Since they were working frantically, they already had no social life. But how to make the funds last? Rent was a sunk cost. Down to their last seventy thousand dollars, they resolved to keep trying out new software ideas until they ran out of money. They had received a hundred and seventy thousand dollars from the incubator Y Combinator, but their project-a plan to make inexpensive cell-phone towers-had failed. In December of 2012, three young men were living in a claustrophobic apartment in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, working on a technology startup. ![]() Tasters have compared Soylent to Cream of Wheat and “my grandpa’s Metamucil.” Photograph by Henry Hargreaves
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