In Lizzie Widdicombe’s article “The End of Food”, the idea of living solely off of Soylent constantly presents itself as a possible alternative lifestyle. It is undeniably an appealing one; drinking a liquid meal replacement that has the concentration of the ideal nutrient intake and is both cost and time effective is no doubt a dream come true for many. With other aspirations in mind, this drink could not only help people maintain a healthy diet in spite of their busy lives, but it could also help people who simply cannot afford healthy food because of their living conditions. Although people might oppose the drink as a full meal replacement, there would be more benefits from a Soylent only diet than detriments. …show more content…
In the article Widdicombe spoke with Walter Willett, a chairman of the Harvard School of Public Health. Willett’s main concern was that it is currently hard to create an “optimally healthy diet” in which you know all of the specifics on the food that you eat. Although you could live off of Soylent alone, you might be missing on other nutrients that have yet to be discovered in our everyday fruits, vegetables, meats, and dairies. Completely forgoing this could prevent us from living maximally Willett explains, “We’re concerned about much more than just surviving”. Another critical downside of Soylent is that it takes away the social association that food has. Widdicombe wrote “You begin to realize how much of your day revolves around food.” When discussing this article with my parents we realized how eating only something like Soylent could be very detrimental to someone 's social life. At restaurants we eat our burgers and drink our sprites but we also talk to each other and socialize. With something like Soylent that is a meal replacer, we will want to spend less time taking breaks from our work knowing that we can get stuff done and eat healthily without ever eating our desks. Imagine a school where your lunch period was just another class you took in the day but they allowed you to sip on Soylent during that period. School would not be the same. Or even a more drastic example, …show more content…
With the goals that Rhinehart has in mind, Soylent is a synthetic food that is both cost and time effect, has optimum nutritional value, and could possibly end world hunger. Although it is very easy to imagine a world like Wall-E where we drink liquified everything and give up on the concept of food in its entirety, most people care about actual too much to let that happen. Like Rhinehart said in Widdicombe’s article, he is not aiming to replace our home cooked meals but our frozen dinners. If we develop more solutions like Soylent, we can help give people nutritional food that is affordable in both time and money. With that, Soylent is pointing the food industry in a direction that is has never taken before until now, and there are plenty of great new products that could be headed our way in the near