Disappointed to be more baseline human than I thought

So after years of delays, I finally got my Soylent a couple months ago. I was absolutely stoked about this product. I don’t spend a lot of time on food prep as it is, but I am forced to spend some amount of time on it, as well as the buying, the eating, the cleaning up afterwards, etc. This product looked to be something akin to the washing machine – freeing a vast amount of time from the necessity of drudging human labor, and all the gains to productivity and quality of life (and in some cases gender equality) that this promised. Plus I never know if I’m actually getting all the nutritional stuff I need to function at full capacity. This would help with that too. And it was so damn cheap! Enthusiasm levels were high. :)

When I first poured a glass it was exactly what it promised – kinda bland, but not bad. Certainly drinkable. And the blandness was a feature, it prevented one from gorging and/or craving more.

But the more I drank it, the less I could stand it. It digested very quickly, and so I was constantly a low level of hungry, but when I tried to bring it to my lips I felt kinda nauseous. It wasn’t a taste thing, it tasted fine, I was just forming an emotion sense of disgust. I suspect my body didn’t recognize this as fuel, and was getting extremely upset at me for putting non-food things inside it when it wanted food. It’s ridiculous how quickly this tanked my quality of life – I was constantly miserable, dreading the thought of swallowing anything, but internally crawling with hunger. I came to loathe everything around me, and my stomach in particular. By the second day I had developed an active hatred for the product, and come lunchtime I dumped it all down the drain and went out for “regular” food.

It tasted so good I almost wanted to cry. I knew at that point Soylent wasn’t going to work for me.

And that’s really disappointing. I was never a fan of food, and philosophically I’m still against it. But I guess it’s something I have a visceral attachment to, and it looks like I’m not as free of those biological cravings as I had hoped. I will miss out on  that aspect of the awesome cyber-future. :( At least until we can hack that part of our brains, which I assume will be quite a ways down the line.

Also – and I know this is a common complaint – it made me gassy. But like, in a ridiculous way. Less than two minutes. Literally under 100 seconds and I would start feeling bubbly and bloated. This isn’t even physically possible, right? It had to have been some psycho-somatic thing, having been primed by other’s reports. I was hoping to resolve that in some manner, but I never got that far, having to give up in less than 36 hours due to the problems stated above.

I tried a friend’s DIY Soylent too, with similar results. I have some MealSquares now, which are quite a bit better and don’t provoke a disgust reaction, but I’m too wary of my previous results to go full-replacement with them, I just use them from time to time when I don’t have time to eat. I’ve come to accept that I will be a slave to real food for quite a while. Plus they’ve also got the gas problem, though to a lesser degree. WTF is in these meal-replacement things that does that? Are they secretly 40% baking soda and 40% hydrogen peroxide?