Ever since reading an opinion piece in the Guardian about Soylent, I have been intrigued by the possibility of experimenting with meal replacements as I thought the experience would be fascinating to look at from an ecocyborg manifesto perspective. It took several months (and the encouragement of a fellow hacker) to work up the courage to give it a try, though we ended up using Huel rather than Soylent because it’s available in the UK in powdered form. For £45, you got two bags of Huel, a shaker, a T-shirt and an instruction manual.
What is this stuff, and what’s it all about? I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but Huel strikes me as being a contraction of HUman fuEL, and it’s what you end up with when you regard food as something that is solely about nutrition to keep the body and brain functioning and generating value. I was particularly struck by the quotation of Rob Rhinehart’s (Soylent founder) deleted blog post in the Guardian opinion piece: “I think it was a bit presumptuous for the architect to assume I wanted a kitchen with my apartment and make me pay for it.” Quite. If the function of food is simply to keep you going, in much the same way electricity does a computer, or fossil fuels a car, then what the hell are you doing faffing around choosing recipes, chopping vegetables, making sauces, and inviting friends over for a meal? That’s time you could be earning money, spending it, or undertaking ‘lifestyle’ activities like free-sky-board-wave-bike-surfing or whatever it is that means you’ll need a crossover SUV, some form of lycra costume, and about £2,000 of kit.
Ironically, the ecocyborg is already putting pressure on you to drop food preparation; another comment piece in the Guardian suggested houses of the future won’t have kitchens. This is so that more and more of us can be crammed like cattle into compact megacities in the name of efficiency and sustainability. The message will, in time, become clear: eating food, rather than scientifically prepared just-add-water nutrient sachets will be seen as a bourgeois indulgence. How outrageously luxurious to be able to cook when you could be running another delivery or developing the next viral meme!
My main finding from trying Huel was that the only way I could get the stuff down without gagging was if I took it with a pinch of salt.
The Ecocyborg Manifesto 