the last supper
The idea of a future-food has been around for ever and has been a long-standing staple of the science fiction genre. The Greeks dreamt of ambrosia, Willy Wonka devised his three-meal chewing gum that did it for champion-chewer Violet Beauregarde, and in the 50s you couldn’t open a space-comic without seeing the protagonists’ pill-popping at meal times. So, is Soylent, the 2012 gastronomic invention of a cooking-and-cleaning hating, spendthrift engineering graduate, the last meal you’ll ever need to eat?
The ingredients read like the contents of a chemistry set: maltodextrin, potassium gluconate, copper, sodium, magnesium oxide, sulphur, choline, bitartrate, iron, and mixed with water and oil, serves up into a tasteless gloop that can be sipped, should the mood take you, throughout the working day. But the smart move by Robert Rhinehart was to realise that what he was intent on concocting, was not something delicious that would compete with the social norm of a lovely lunch or a delectable dinner, but nutritious – something which would maintain his health whilst maximising his time to do everything else he wanted. He appreciated you needed amino acids and lipids, not milk; carbohydrates not bread; protein not red meat. And, with demand out-stripping supply, and the US Army expressing serious interest in it, the boy’s not done too shabbily out it
Fans of Soylent insist it’s an efficient way of delivering the nutrients we need to live, whilst minimising our reliance on laborious, costly, resource-intensive agriculture, potentially of tremendous importance in combatting famine. Others talk of Soylent’s potential impact on our social conventions, including the liberating of millions of women throughout both developed and third world countries, from the toils of the kitchen.
Thankfully, I can’t see it taking the place of my meat-and-two-veg anytime soon, and the condemned man ordering up a warming cup of Soylent as his last meal before shuffling off this mortal coil ain’t ever going to happen, but somehow, I think the young man might just be onto something.
