THE SOYLENT MEAN

Nectar- flavoured Soylent Drink tastes like the milk at the bottom of a bowl of Fruit Loops and feels like shame. It comes in a 14- oz bottle with an ominously incongruous descriptor – “ready- to- drink food” – stamped in jet- black Helvetica toward the top.

Inside is a kind of light, pale yellow milkshake made of soy protein, sunflower oil and something the website calls “slow- metabolizing disaccharide synthesized from beets.” Every bottle dispatches 20 per cent of its consumer’s daily nutritional requirements.

I’ve been living on Soylent Drink for a week almost exclusively. My body feels terrific. My dignity has withered and died.

Sharing my enthusiasm for Soylent was, I understand now, a mistake. My dearest friends and confidants have responded with mockery, as though out of nowhere I had outed myself as a flat- earth truther or fan of Nickelback. “Soylent is the vaping of food,” a friend told me over the weekend, by way of explaining why I was fair game for ridicule. And that comparison does indeed ring true: both trends share both novelty and embarrassment.

Many of the people I’ve talked to about my new diet have been goodhumoured and, if not exactly encouraging, at least implicitly supportive; the prevailing response seems to be something like “it’s a free country.” Others, meanwhile, have taken it as a kind of personal violation: what drinking Soylent and telling others about it has quickly made clear to me is that people don’t care at all about the lifestyle habits of others until the moment those habits are notably redefined.

Embracing something conspicuously unnatural – despite the science behind it, the reams of positive testimony, the ethos of self- improvement and aspiration toward better health that it reflects – crosses a line.

Personally, I welcome the losses in respect and diminished reputation! My slow- metabolizing disaccharide bed has been made and I’m resigned to sleep in it. But please, refrain from animosity and umbrage.

This nutritious Fruit Loop milk isn’t harming anyone or anything except my self- respect.