You are what you slurp

I remember my dad used to enjoy a liquid lunch with his buddies &#8212 Scotch on the rocks as I recall &#8212 to get away from the pressures of the office. Well now, according to The New York Times, the liquid lunch is back.
Specifically, a liquid lunch called Soylent. The idea is not to get away from the job, but get back to it as soon as possible.

Soylent is a nutritional powder that you mix with water to drink for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It was invented by Rob Rhinehart and deliberately named after the 1973 film starring Charlton Heston about a starving world, reduced to grinding up deceased people to act as a food source called, “Soylent Green.” Seems like a fairly suicidal approach to product branding. But not to Rob, who talked to “Motherboard” when the product first came out.

“I really like the name, I think it gets the right idea across,” Rhinehart said. “What do you expect? “It’s called ‘Soylent.’ It’s cheap, it’s efficient.”

The Times reports that it has become so popular with tech workers in the Silicon Valley that Rob has now shipped six million meals, even though the taste has been described as like “licking a penny.” All that matters is that it keeps you alive so you can code without interruption.

It’s shocking. All these brilliant people, inventing amazing time-saving devices, and they don’t even have the time to eat at McDonald’s! I thought the tech industry was going to give us more leisure time.

Instead, you live with a digital bumble bee in your pants always trying to sting your thigh with some urgent message.

Soylent and its imitators may be completely vegan.

“We don’t use human body parts,” Rhinehart said.

But it’s part of a culture that seems to be consuming us just the same.