The End of Food Is Here, Finally
16th May 2016
If you’ve heard about Soylent at all, it’s likely as a saccharine, mealy, unappetizing glop that a bunch of journalists tried and failed to live off of exclusively, just like Soylent’s inventor, Rob Rhinehart.
Marketed to coders and people launching startups, the entire Soylent phenomenon came across as a cult designed to deprive the rest of the world of some of the most basic pleasures of all—good food and the fellowship that comes with it.
But with an infusion of $20 million in January 2015 from venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Soylent the company pivoted from being a vehicle for its inventor’s quasi-apocalyptic notions about the future of humanity—Mr. Rhinehart recently declared that “grocery shopping is a multisensory living nightmare,” while lamenting that his apartment came with a kitchen—to a brand targeting people who just need something healthy and cheap to tide them over until their next proper meal.