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.

Adrianne Jeffries had a simple dream: to "hack lunch" by ordering a week's supply of Soylent, the food of the future for people who have better things to do than eat. It took five months for her order to arrive and now Jeffries, managing editor for Motherboard, can't get rid of it.

Soylent, the venture-backed startup snack that aims to replace food with oils and powders, has upgraded their nu-food. Optimization-obsessed techies will get a lot with the update: new packaging, better sealant on their oil bottles, and more flavor modulation. And best of all? The new Soylent will make techies tear less ass:

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.

If you want to buy three servings of a nutritional powder than can be combined with water to create a synthetic "meal" with the exact appearance and consistency of semen, you're going to pay a lot for the privilege. Soylent is really in demand.

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.