Addicts will go to great lengths to get their fix. And shipping delays for the meal replacement Soylent have created a market of famished nu food fiends. One San Francisco startup has decided to fill the void with a knockoff powder they call "Schmoylent."
Rob Rhinehart thinks he's hacked food. As the inventor of Soylent, he's managed to replace the inefficient process of chewing food. But his lifestyle is still full of luxuries like water. Now the monkish nu-food mogul is torturing his body to save some H2O.
Soylent, the semen-esque food substitute financed by venture capitalists, is nothing if not resilient. It can keep you sated for hours with a full, gaseous feeling. It can even withstand reports of rats in its kitchen and still show up in The New Yorker. But slurping the fun out of life's most basic pleasure requires some social media marketing.
Soylent is a tough sell, as it's impossible to try it and not think about eating sperm. But it's a cult hit among a certain Silicon Valley subset, which swears it's actually a viable alternative to the venerable human pastime of chewing. It sounds (is?) crazy, but not too crazy to get a big new funding round.
