Soylent Confessions

If you’ve been on the Internet in the last fifteen years and change, you’ve probably heard of Soylent, whether you wanted to or not. Nutrition drinks as a category have been around forever, pitched in various forms to dieters or weightlifters or people who just frequently find themselves rushing in the morning. Nobody gives their coworkers shit for grabbing a prepackaged smoothie for breakfast. Soylent, though, has a distinctly bad reputation. Partly, that comes from the fact that the original version—the one most people know about—looks and tastes like watery cake batter (to pick one of the kinder descriptions). But a lot of it comes from Soylent’s associations. Its “food for people who hate food” gestalt. Its vibe. As a December 2025 SFGate article put it, When this liquid meal replacement was first introduced more than a decade ago, it became symbolic of the Bay Area’s rising tech scene and the brutal gentrification that followed. […] At its core, Soylent feels like an extension of…