Morgan Lindsey 

English 110 

Professor Miller

Project #1

            Food, any nutritious substance that people or animals eat or drink to maintain life and growth. Soylent, a nutritious liquid substance that is used as a substitute for actual foods to save on time wasted while eating. Soylent resembles a “gooey lemonade,” (2) or ‘“crappy brownie mix’” (14) as described in Lizzie Widdicombe’s The End of Food. In this paper she interviews Soylent creator Rob Rhinehart. Rhinehart and I have two different views on what food and meals are. 

            Rhinehart views food and meals as an inconvenience. For him “Food was such a large burden,” (1). Rhinehart sees time as precious and when it comes to getting the food, making the food, and then cleaning up the food so much time has been wasted. He was wasting time he could be using to work. Rhinehart, being an engineering major at Georgia Tech, started to disassemble the makeup of food to look at not as food but as if it were an “engineering problem” (1) to be solved. “You need amino acids and lipids, not milk itself,” (1) “You need carbohydrates, not bread,” (1). Instead of looking at the food in a way we typically look at it, he looks at the chemical makeup and what exactly you would need to survive and keep your body healthy.

Before reading Widdicombe’s paper, my ideas about food and meals were not the same as Rhinehart. I had never really thought too much about food and how eating is taking up too much time out of my day or it being a burden. I normally tend to not have breakfast during the weekdays due to early classes, and sometimes not even lunch depending on the day and the number of classes I have. If I do pack something for a busy day it is just a granola bar or some type of small snack in hopes that it will hold me over till dinner. 

While reading this essay, I wanted to find fault in what he was saying. I wanted to make the point that meals are meant to be a thing that brings people together to socialize or relax. I wanted to make the point that you couldn’t replace meals with just a drink. I tried to find points to argue, but I simple could not find anything that provided relevant evidence. 

In my essay I talk about how meals bring people together to enjoy the moment. I explain that our favorite dishes “gives us a sense of home.” These dishes tend to be at family dinners or holidays. Rhinehart made the Soylent drink to have as a quick meal so you don’t interrupt you daily tasks and work. It is a quick and simple option instead of going to get something at the store or cafeteria to save time. These are two different topics that are difficult to compare due to the fact that they take place for different reasons. You can’t replace a family dinner with a Soylent drink and that is not the point for the Soylent drinks. That is a point me and Rhinehart agree upon. During Rhinehart’s interactions with Widdicombe he explains to her, ‘“we’ll see a separation between our meals for utility and function, and our meals for experience and socialization”’ (3). He is saying that the Soylent drink isn’t meant to take the place of family dinners for socialization, it is meant for quick option during a busy day when you don’t really have time to stop for a meal. He didn’t make it to replace all meals. 

But during a conversation with Ethan Brown, he contradicts that point. Brown had called Soylent “a meal replacement,” (11) Rhinehart then responds with, “It’s kind of an over-all food substitute” (11). Though this point does go against what he previously had said I do not have evidence the go against it theoretically. It can replace the food during a meal, but not the interactions around the meal. We don’t normally remember what we eat for our meals we tend to remember the conversations we have during those meals. Therefore, it could substitute the food we eat for our meals and it wouldn’t change the conversation during it. 

He makes it seem like you could fully live off of Soylent, and that might be possible, but it might cause health problems to completely switch your whole diet to a liquid. Even Rhinehart I doubt completely survives solely relies on the Soylent drink. There some meals where you need to eat real food and not just sip a chemical mixture. For me, I enjoy events like the Christmas or New Year’s Eve. These are times in which the meal and conversation are equally important. “I enjoy it because of the conversations and laughter that happen around the table while eating it,” [ML1] 

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 [ML1]look over again to change