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Official development blog for the PARANOIA roleplaying game. No description is available at your security clearance. The Computer is your friend.

Thursday, March 14, 2013

PARANOIA in the real world: Soylent 

You know what's an irreversible waste of time, money and effort? Eating food you take pleasure in eating. I mean, wouldn't you rather just ingest a tasteless form of sustenance for the rest of your life and never have to go through that tedious rigmarole of opening and eating a pre-made sandwich or enjoying a huge hungover fry-up ever again? Rob Rhinehart -- a 24-year-old software engineer from Atlanta and, presumably, an impossibly busy man -- thinks so.

Rob found himself resenting the inordinate amount time it takes to fry an egg in the morning and decided something had to be done. Simplifying food as "nutrients required by the body to function" (which sounds totally bulimic, I know, but I promise it's not), Rob has come up with an odourless, beige cocktail he calls Soylent.

I wasn't sure if he was trolling at first, because "soylent" is the name of a wafer made out of human flesh and fed to the overpopulated masses in the seminal 1973 sf film Soylent Green, but then I read the extensive post on Rob's blog about how he came to make the stuff and started to believe him. Soylent contains all the nutritive components of a balanced diet, but with just a third of the calories and none of the toxins or cancer-causing stuff you'd usually find waiting to kill you in your lunch. Despite the fact it looks a bit like vomit, Soylent supposedly has the potential to change the entire world's relationship with food, so I spoke to Rob to find out how.

"This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again" (Monica Heisey, Vice magazine)

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Posted by: Allen Varney / 12:41 AM

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