Soylent (meal replacement)
Soylent is a brand of chemicals masquerading as a meal replacement. It aims to provide complete nutrition in every bottle in the most boring way imaginable.
Soylent was introduced in 2014 after a Kickstarter campaign to make Soylent Green a real food you can buy. It has since been negatively received by consumers and the media, due to its neither being green nor made with human remains. Its producer, Rosa Labs Inc., is the subject of a pending false advertisement lawsuit.
Invention[edit]
The invention of Soylent is credited to Rob Rhinehart, a former hobo from Los Angeles, California. Rhinehart was dismayed by the lack of variety in meals available from garbage cans located throughout his hometown. He felt that he and others like him could not possibly expect to get balanced nutrition from a half-eaten apple here and the leftover portion of a Happy Meal there. Eventually, Rhinehart came up with the ingenious solution of gathering up a little bit of everything he could find in the trash cans, blending it into a single homogeneous mixture, and drinking it. This permitted him to try everything at once in a single serving, eliminating the need to decide which dumpster he was going to dive in for a given meal. This recipe became popular with other members of the local homeless community, and Rhinehart recognized a business opportunity.
In 2013, Rhinehart used a computer at the local library to begin his now-famous crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. He sought to make his product more appealing to would-be investors by adding green food coloring, and claiming it would solve the homeless problem by using their bodies as a key ingredient. This made Soylent gain a strong reputation for efficiency from the early hype, and venture capitalists were hooked on the idea.
Health effects[edit]
Soylent is claimed to provide 100% of your daily recommended intake of all vitamins and minerals in every bottle. This is accomplished by grinding up a bunch of Flintstones chewable multivitamins and sucking out any trace of flavor, then optionally mixing it with water and oils. No dead bodies are used in any formula released yet; Rosa Labs is sticking with algae and soy as their product's protein source until human remains have gained FDA approval.
The makers of Soylent are very serious about providing the most nutritionally-complete food possible. This has lead them to include trace amounts of other lesser-known nutrients essential to human health, including lead, cadmium, and dairy by-products from time to time.
Drinkers of Soylent have consistently reported that the product causes flatulence and occasionally vomiting. This is the most exciting aspect of the product, and is heavily marketed as a benefit of drinking the concoction.
Flavor[edit]
Since Soylent's original formulation with random refuse Rhinehart found lying around, the taste has not improved much. General consensus is that the flavor of regular Soylent is bland, dull and especially disappointing to connoisseurs of cannibalism.
Recently, Rosa Labs has experimented with new flavors of Soylent to rekindle interest in an otherwise boring product. Rhinehart suggested the idea for Coffiest (Soylent mixed with a marginal amount of coffee) after rooting through the trash of a local Starbucks. Cacao Soylent came about as part of a deal with candy manufacturers to discretely dispose of unsold Valentine's Day chocolate from years prior, when it was too far past the expiration date to sell in the original packaging. Nobody knows what Nectar Soylent is flavored with, but Rosa Labs forced Rhinehart to sign an agreement after its release to market to never occupy a taste-testing role at his own company ever again.
Version history[edit]
Rosa Labs views Soylent as a perfect food, despite continuous "improvement". It adopted a version numbering scheme for each of its recipe variants, similar to that found in software.
Powder[edit]
| Version | Changes | Reason for recall | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Soylent 1.0 |
First full version. Used rice as the protein source, disappointing cannibals expecting human flesh and everyone else who expected soy. | Caused some curious early adopters mild flatulence. Rosa Labs promptly apologized, and promised to make the experience uniform for everyone. | Early 2014 |
| Soylent 1.1 |
Decreased sucralose content, opting instead for cheaper and more carcinogenic aspartame. The joy of drinking Soylent was estimated to have been decreased by 2.6% as a result, seen by the manufacturer as an improvement. Digestive enzymes were also added to make consuming the trash-based contents a bit easier. | Formula tweaks did not induce consistent flatulence as hoped, but rather occasional diarrhea. Rhinehart promised to get it right on the third try by "eating his own dog food." | October 2, 2014 |
| Soylent 1.2 |
Rhinehart added dog food to the ingredients list. The amount of fish in the mixture was reduced and replaced with algae. The digestive enzymes from the last revision were removed after it was discovered that they were sourced from vomit. | This version began inducing projectile vomiting in some consumers, a secondary concern to its overly high lead content. The company pledged to reduce the lead to the safe levels found in drinking water. | November 10, 2014 |
| Soylent 1.3 |
Sodium phosphate added as a preservative. The shipping boxes were made smaller due to a cardboard shortage. The lead levels were reduced and replaced with much more nutritious cadmium. | The levels of added cadmium were much too high, and also contained trace amounts of arsenic due to a supplier issue. Despite Rosa Labs' insistence that these chemicals improved the consistency and flavor of Soylent, public pressure from all five users of Soylent at the time forced them to revise it yet again. | December 11, 2014 |
| Soylent 1.4 |
Rosa Labs invented powdered fat in a freak science accident, and added it to the bottles hoping nobody would notice. Cardboard packaging was further reduced as the worldwide cardboard shortage got worse and riots at cardboard factories started. Isomaltulose was added because the name sounded sophisticated, and gum acacia was removed to make the drink less chewy. | Some consumers objected to the addition of the powdered fat, claiming it tasted too much like oatmeal. This made the Soylent actually taste like something edible, in direct contrast to the company's quality standards. | February 25, 2015 |
| Soylent 1.5 |
Oat flour was removed as a powdered fat ingredient, replaced with fats derived from discarded Big Macs and bacon. Texture was also improved, since consumers were less likely to find whole oats floating in the drink now. Motor oil was accidentally introduced as a contaminant, then kept in the final shipment for its health benefits. | Salmonella makes its first appearance in the drink, increasing the chances of experiencing explosive diarrhea after drinking Soylent. Rosa Labs kept it in greater concentrations and began marketing its presence as a healthy probiotic. | June 1, 2015 |
| Soylent 1.6 |
The rice protein is finally replaced with actual soy. Algae is now also used as a protein and oils source, although where the algae got the protein and oils from is a topic Rosa Labs prefers not to discuss and initially insists doesn't matter. Other ingredients were borrowed from the Soylent 2.0 drinks (see below) out of sheer laziness. | The shits finally hit the Soylent fans, hard. Soylent is now viewed as a market competitor to Haribo sugar-free gummy bears, which is not a segment Soylent is interested in expanding into yet. This version is finally banned by the FDA by October later that year for its sheer toxicity. Exact numbers of people killed by Soylent during this time frame is still not fully known. | June 23, 2016 |
| Soylent 1.7 |
The algae is removed. Rosa Labs still would not say why or what it actually contained. Hopeful consumers spread rumors that human bodies were finally being experimented with, but the real source is revealed to be a red tide collected from a local park's pond after Rhinehart urinated in it. | None, surprisingly. Rosa Labs views this as a failure to identify areas of improvement, and works even harder on the next release. | December 15, 2016 |
| Soylent 1.8 |
Isomaltooligosaccharide is removed since nobody knows how to pronounce it, and corn is added instead. More gum is removed to help the drink stick less to consumers' teeth. Weight per serving was increased to appeal to the professionally obese. | The shits return with a vengeance for the lactose-intolerant, as Rosa Labs somehow screwed up again and added spoiled milk to the formula. Rosa Labs is now working on a new formula which provides similar benefits to the lactose-tolerant. | March 13, 2017 |
Ready-made drink[edit]
| Version | Changes | Reason for recall | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Soylent 2.0 (later renamed to "Original") |
Pre-mixed Soylent for the truly lazy. Soy is still used for the protein source while the company seeks FDA approval for switching to human flesh. Leftover algae is still used to provide the oil. The plastic bottle it comes in has more flavor than its contents. | First batch of Soylent susceptible to botulism. Some people who ordered this because they don't know how to mix the powder still starved to death from being too stupid to open the bottles. | September 9, 2015 |
| Coffiest | Soylent 2.0 with coffee mixed in. Rosa Labs is now trying to compete with Starbucks. | Too much coffee added, with a caffeine content high enough to stop an elephant's heart. | August 9, 2016 |
| Cacao | Soylent 2.0 with chocolate flavoring added. It is like chocolate milk, except nobody knows for sure what's in it, not even the manufacturer. | The first decent-tasting Soylent variant was too popular for its own good. Willy Wonka sued Rosa Labs for patent infringement, and the latter was forced to take it off the market. | December 26, 2016 |
| Nectar | Soylent 2.0 with "fruit" flavoring added. Toucan Sam was hired as an outside consultant to create the new flavor; he has personally defecated in every batch after a week of drinking nothing except Rhinehart's red tide algae. | Not yet recalled; nobody who has tried Nectar Soylent has survived long enough to file a complaint. | December 26, 2016 |
Bar[edit]
| Version | Changes | Reason for recall | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Soylent Bar 1.0 |
First solid form of Soylent. Flavored like salted caramel to hide the fact that there's algae in it. | Rosa Lab's most potent mixture yet reliably induces projectile vomiting, explosive diarrhea, salmonella, botulism, and at least seven other as-of-yet-unidentified foodborne illnesses within 15 minutes of consumption in anyone who so much as licks the end of the bar. Rhinehart later admitted that part of the mixture comes from trash he dug out of the dumpsters behind a Taco Bell. The product is permanently discontinued until a new fast food dumpster source has been identified. | August 16, 2016 (Banned by the FDA) |