Soylent Coffee is For When You’ve Given Up

Instead of two very utilitarian drinks, drink one

Soylent has this newish beverage called Coffiest (“ready-t0-drink-food-with-coffee”), which tastes almost nothing like coffee and almost everything like a carob-flavored Ensure. Former Awl editor Matt Buchanan described it thusly: “sort of like runny pancake batter with some coffee grounds and maybe a tiny bit of chocolate mixed in.” It’s hard to drink at any pace faster than occasional sips, not because it’s repulsive or even bad exactly, but one does have the sense of ingesting a watered-down nutrition paste. Gulp at your own risk of feeling sickly full.

As for the caffeination part, I had already consumed two cups of coffee, but I do feel pretty buzzed. I guess the thing that worries me about caffeinated nutrition drink is that it reminds me of the slop that the fatty future blob-people sucked down in Wall-E as they floated around on their hoverscooters. It’s extremely convenient if you Just Can’t Be Bothered, but then again most people who use that phrase are just looking to justify lazy behavior.

Rob Rhinehart, the software engineer who first created it, is something of the model of a modern lifehacking tech bro, and the product itself strikes me as conceptually very male. It’s like Slim-fast for men, or Ensure for middle-aged dudes, or Muscle Milk for skinny-fat shut-ins, except it’s not about diet per se, but about eliminating the concept of food altogether. There are so many things to worry about these days when it comes to food—whether it’s ecologically sound, healthful, well balanced—which takes a lot of time and moral energy. If you get rid of the decision about what to eat and where it comes from, you’ve optimized your daily process. Just like Obama and his suits: blue or gray, blue or gray, gray or blue.

Soylent is the gray suit, except it’s the basic-issue gray sweatsuit from the “Black Mirror” episode, “Fifteen Million Merits.” Soylent coffee is that, but with zipoff cargo-pants. Suit yourself.