Gunnar Fryzlewicz
Professor Miller
English 110, H2
3 October 2018
Can Food be Replaced? (Final Draft)
What purpose does food serve in your life? Is it simply a meal that sustains you with enough nutrients and resources to last through the day, or is it what brings people together? Rob Rhinehart, a twenty-five-year-old electrical engineering major from Georgia Tech sees food as an engineering project. In 2012, Rhinehart and a few colleagues were working on a project with a fixed budget. As time went on, that budget dwindled, and one major problem arose: food. Frozen foods wouldn’t cut it and the grocery bills were adding up. Faced with budget and time restraints they had to come up with a solution and fast. Then, Rhinehart had a solution to their problem, and it was named Soylent. An inexpensive food substitute that provides the body with all the vitamins and minerals that the body requires to thrive. Rhinehart put Soylent through testing and proved that you can live off Soylent and retain health benefits. Rhinehart observed that his physique had noticeably improved, his skin became clearer, teeth whiter, thicker hair, and he didn’t have any dandruff (Widdicombe, 2). This is a good meal substitute. Some might say good enough to replace food and others beg to differ. Food isn’t just eaten for its nutritional value. It also holds an emotional, memorable, and health value too. Claiming a food substitute, like soylent, to be a replacement for food is an over exaggeration.
The press views Soylent as the end of food, but Rhinehart sees Soylent in a different way. Rhinehart believes that his Soylent will not replace our daily meals but replace our junk foods, like twinkies and cakes, instead. This statement is overly optimistic. Soylent will not replace our junk food but replace our meals instead and, here is why. People, especially the American people, enjoy their unhealthy sweets too much just to trade them over for doughy sludge. If anything, it will replace healthy food especially since it is advertised as a healthy option. Soylent will be something to sip on to get your necessities so that you can chug an energy drink and eat a candy bar. Think of it as the solution to the veggie issue with kids. People will see it as a way to get what they need for the day and then move onto dessert, to bypass the veggies and get to the good stuff. It will become something to replace lunch and dinner while you still go out with friends to purchase McDonalds and other unhealthy foods. These junk foods, fast food restaurants and food in general hold too many memories to simply be replaced by Soylent.
Food brings people of all different colors, races, ethnicities and backgrounds together. It is a common goal that everyone enjoys, eating food. It is especially something that brings families together. If Soylent were to replace food, family cooking would be less memorable. Gathering around a table to eat something that took seconds to prepare, bland, a basic color and smells unsettling doesn’t sound like something that brings people together. When you take away that special bond over food you are removing the excitement and emotion that comes with it. You’re no longer looking forward to something that means something to you. This relates to what my father says in My Favorite Food essay about pancakes in the morning. He says that “during the week we all eat cereal, oatmeal and occasionally, eggs. Pancakes are family cohesive in a way as it signifies that the weekend is here, and we can all relax with something homemade, sweet, and delicious. The scent of pancakes means the weekend is here and we are happy and relaxed together”. In this quote my father sees pancakes as something unique, not the norm. He sees pancakes as a signifier of the weekend and something that brings the family together.
If Soylent were to replace food, then you would lose that feeling and emotion because soylent would be all that you eat. Compare it to something that you eat all the time. At first the food is different then as you continuously eat it over-and-over again it becomes bland or unsatisfying. Food adds excitement and change to our lives. It switches things up adding variety and surprises through taste, aesthetics, and scent. Lizzie Widdicombe, a reporter for the New Yorker, said it best “Meals provide punctuation to our lives: we’re constantly recovering from them, anticipating them, riding the emotional ups and downs of a good or a bad sandwich. With a bottle of Soylent on your desk time stretches before you, featureless and a little sad” (Widdicombe, 14). Widdicombe also sees that food adds emotion to our lives, as well as emphasize certain emotions. Food is almost like a friend. Food is that someone you have good times with and bad times with. It’s something that picks you up or causes you to fall. Food adds emotion to your day and soylent can’t supply that emotion, or at least not for very long. Food also finds meaning in our family heritage.
Think of all the family recipes that have been created and strengthened through the generations. Also think of the emotion put into these meals. The hatred from war, the happiness from making it for a loved one or close friend, or the joy of creating something fantastic. These are things developed from an evolving recipe where the combinations to make a dish are endless. Soylent lacks this due to its blandness and lack of uniqueness. There is a set amount of carbohydrates, proteins and lipids, measured to perfection for optimal intake in Soylent. Food was created from throwing things together, the measuring came later. The ingredients were measured through an emotion, feeling, thought, or meaning. Many of these meals became the baseline idea for many of our holidays and religious festivities.
Christmas Dinner, Thanksgiving, Sabbath, Weddings, etc. All these festivities have some tie to a family, tradition or memory. Each one made unique and special by a viewpoint of religion or family bond. We as humans relate food to an inner meaning and use holidays as a way of expressing that meaning. For example, my dad’s favorite meal, as mentioned in My Favorite Meal essay, is Thanksgiving. When I asked him what his favorite meal is he told me Thanksgiving and gave me a reason along with what the meal meant to him. His “favorite meal is Thanksgiving Dinner, with turkey and all the side dishes. All the meal is very good, everyone is relaxed, and all the family is together to enjoy it. It is a great meal and a great family atmosphere”. My dad sees the big picture of Thanksgiving, a holiday based on food, that brings families together and creates a relaxed atmosphere. Food creates that meaning in a holiday and helps create emotions in a family. Soylent cannot replace those family connections it cannot bring families together the same way food can, and it cannot replace the unknown health factors in food either.
Science has always been evolving and finding new ways to combat real world issues, like disease. Food has played a large role in helping cure diseases, from scraps on a plate creating penicillin, to synthesizing cancer preventing cells found in the skins of certain fruits. Lizzy Widdicombe mentions the viewpoint of several doctors on Soylent’s ability to sustain a human body. These doctors mentioned a substance found in plants called phytochemicals. These chemicals “appear to provide important health benefits. Lycopene, which makes tomatoes red, has been linked to lower rates of prostate cancer; flavonoid compounds, which make blueberries blue, have been associated with lower rates of diabetes” (Widdicombe, 9). These phytochemicals are new findings with food, and show that we are still discovering new things every day.
Humanity has always been creating cures and finding treatments to better our general health. The health benefits we obtain from foods are mainly due to phytochemicals. Lizzy Widdicombe mentions the viewpoint of several doctors on Soylent’s ability to sustain a human body. These doctors mentioned a substance found in plants called phytochemicals. Phytochemicals “appear to provide important health benefits. Lycopene, which makes tomatoes red, has been linked to lower rates of prostate cancer; flavonoid compounds, which make blueberries blue, have been associated with lower rates of diabetes” (Widdicombe, 9). These chemicals are the same things that Rhinehart does not include into his Soylent. Rhinehart, after looking into phytochemicals, decided to not include them into his mixture claiming that they don’t “seem like an efficient use of resources” (Widdicombe, 9). By leaving out these chemicals Rhinehart has excluded health benefits from his Soylent. This is a bold move since these phytochemicals are a relatively new discovery.
Phytochemicals are a field that is relatively new to science, not a lot about them has been discovered. Yet, Rhinehart has already presumed that their purpose in food is not necessary for our general health and should be excluded in our diet. Walter Willett, chair of nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health, said “It’s a little bit presumptuous to think that we actually know everything that goes into an optimally healthy diet” (Widdicombe, 9). There are chemicals in food that help us in fighting disease and aid in our metabolism that we haven’t discovered yet. Without the complete understanding of a healthy diet or the health factors in food it would be healthier for someone to stay with food, then to replace it.
Soylent was created by Rob Rhinehart to solve the problem of food expense and saving time. He later realized its possibility as a food replacement, aiming the Soylent to replace our meaningless, and junk foods. This thought, although a nice one, was presumptuous. The taste of eating unhealthy food, especially with friends, trumps that of a dough smelling sludge. The time spent with food around family, especially through the generations of a family, and the memories created cannot be replaced by Soylent. Neither can the health benefits related to foods. The unknown factors of food, like lycopene and other disease preventing chemicals in food, cannot be overlooked for a time saving meal replacement. Soylent will find its place with the other food substitutes from the past on the bottom shelf in the health foods isle at Walmart. The thought that someone can shove the necessities, emotions, memories, generations of family preparation, and the love of food into a blender was an overstatement. If food wasn’t so memorable, then why would we be craving something our mother or father made for us when we were little?
Works Cited
Widdicombe, Lizzie. “The End of Food.” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 19 June 2017, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/12/the-end-of-food.
Fryzlewicz, James. Personal Interview, 9 September 2018.
Gunnar Fryzlewicz
Professor Miller
English 110
9/17/18
Soylent Green (draft 1)
What purpose does food serve in your life? Is it simply a meal that sustains you with enough nutrients and resources to last through the day, or is it what brings people together? Rob Rhinehart, a twenty-five-year-old electrical engineering major from Georgia Tech sees food as an engineering project. In 2012, three young men, including Rhinehart, were working on inexpensive cell phone towers with a fixed budget. As time went on, their budget dwindled and one major problem arose: food. They ate frozen junk food and McDonalds but the grocery bills were still adding up. Faced with budget and time restraints Rhinehart thought of a solution. He thought about the main essentials of a diet like the vitamins and nutrients a human body requires and formulated a cheap recipe. His result was an inexpensive food substitute that replaces an everyday diet with the essential vitamins and nutrients that a human body requires. Through testing and feedback, it has been proven that you can live off of Soylent, and it actually has health benefits. Rhinehart observed that his physique had noticeably improved, his skin became clearer, teeth whiter, thicker hair, and he didn’t have any dandruff (Widdicombe). Food isn’t just eaten for its nutritional value. It also holds an emotional, memorable and an economic value too. Claiming a food substitute, like Soylent, to be a replacement for food is an over exaggeration.
The press views soylent as the “end of food”, but Rhinehart sees soylent in a different way (Widdicombe). Rhinehart believes that his soylent will not replace our daily meals, but instead replace our junk food. This statement is overly optimistic. Soylent will not replace our junk food and here is why. People, especially teens, enjoy junk food and sweats too much just to trade them over for doughy sludge. If anything, it will replace healthy food since it is advertised as a healthy option. Soylent will be seen as a way to skip your daily meal and get to the dessert. It will become something to replace lunch and dinner while you still go out with friends to purchase McDonald’s and other unhealthy foods. These junk foods, fast food restaurants, and food, in general, hold too many memories to simply be replaced by Soylent.
Food, as a whole, brings people of all different colors, races, ethnicities, and backgrounds together. It is a common goal that everyone enjoys, eating food. It is especially something that what my father thinks about pancakes in the morning. He says that “during the week we all eat cereal, oatmeal and occasionally, eggs. Pancakes are family cohesive in a way as it signifies that the weekend is here and we can all relax with something homemade, sweet, and delicious. The scent of pancakes means the weekend is here and we are happy and relaxed together” (Fryzlewicz). In this quote, my father sees pancakes as something unique, not the norm. He sees pancakes as a signifier of the weekend and something homely brings us all together. If Soylent were to replace food, then you would lose that feeling, that emotion because Soylent would be all that you eat. Lizzie Widdicombe, a reporter for the New Yorker, has a similar feeling about food. “Meals provide punctuation to our lives: we’re constantly recovering from them, anticipating them, riding the emotional ups and downs of a good or a bad sandwich. With a bottle of soylent on your desk time stretches before you, featureless and a little sad” (Widdicombe). Widdicombe also sees that food has a meaning in our lives. It like a friend. It’s someone that you have good times with and bad times with. It’s something that picks you and something that can cause you to fall. Although, there are negatives to having certain foods those negatives are what makes the positives so much better. They are the dip that makes us look forward to the rise.
Food, in general, teases us with emotion, brings families together. If Soylent were to replace food, family cooking would be less memorable. Gathering around a table to eat something that took seconds to prepare, is bland, a basic color and smells unsettling doesn’t sound like something that brings people together. When you take away that special bond over food you are removing the excitement and emotion that comes with it. Yours no longer looking forward to something that means something to you. This relates to
Gunnar Fryzlewicz
Professor Miller
English 110
9/17/18
Soylent Green (Draft 2)
What purpose does food serve in your life? Is it simply a meal that sustains you with enough nutrients and resources to last through the day, or is it what brings people together? Rob Rhinehart, a twenty-five-year-old electrical engineering major from Georgia Tech sees food as an engineering project. In 2012, three young men, including Rhinehart, were working on inexpensive cell phone towers with a fixed budget. As time went on, their budget dwindled, and one major problem arose: food. They ate frozen junk food and McDonald’s, but the grocery bills were still adding up. Faced with budget and time restraints they had to come up with a solution and fast. Then Rhinehart had a solution to their problem, Soylent. An inexpensive food substitute that provides the body with all the vitamins and minerals that the body requires to thrive. Rhinehart put soylent through testing and proved that you can live off soylent and retain health benefits. Rhinehart observed that his physique had noticeably improved, his skin became clearer, teeth whiter, thicker hair, and he didn’t have any dandruff (Widdicombe). This is a good meal substitute, some might say good enough to replace food and others beg to differ. Food isn’t just eaten for its nutritional value. It also holds an emotional, memorable, and health value too. Claiming a food substitute, like Soylent, to be a replacement for food is an over exaggeration.
The press views soylent as the “end of food”, but Rhinehart sees soylent in a different way (Widdicombe). Rhinehart believes that his soylent will not replace our daily meals but replace our junk food instead. This statement is overly optimistic. Soylent will not replace our junk food but replace our meals instead and, here is why. People, especially the American people, enjoy junk food and sweats too much just to trade them over for doughy sludge. If anything, it will replace healthy food especially since it is advertised as a healthy option. Soylent will be a way to replace your daily meal so that you can go straight to the dessert. Get your vitamins then eat a box of Twinkies. It will become something to replace lunch and dinner while you still go out with friends to purchase McDonald’s and other unhealthy foods. These junk foods, fast food restaurants, and food, in general, hold too many memories to simply be replaced by Soylent.
Food brings people of all different colors, races, ethnicities, and backgrounds together. It is a common goal that everyone enjoys, eating food. It is especially something that brings families together. If Soylent were to replace food, family cooking would be less memorable. Gathering around a table to eat something that took seconds to prepare, bland, a basic color and smells unsettling doesn’t sound like something that brings people together. When you take away that special bond over food you are removing the excitement and emotion that comes with it. You’re no longer looking forward to something that means something to you. This relates to what my father thinks about pancakes in the morning. He says that “during the week we all eat cereal, oatmeal and occasionally, eggs. Pancakes are family cohesive in a way as it signifies that the weekend is here, and we can all relax with something homemade, sweet, and delicious. The scent of pancakes means the weekend is here and we are happy and relaxed together” (Fryzlewicz).
In this quote, my father sees pancakes as something unique, not the norm. He sees pancakes as a signifier of the weekend and something that brings the family together. If Soylent were to replace food, then you would lose that feeling and emotion because Soylent would be all that you eat. Compare it to something that you eat all the time. At first, the food is different than as you continuously eat it over-and-over again it becomes bland or unsatisfying. Food adds excitement and change to our lives. It switches things up adding variety and surprises through taste, aesthetics, and scent. Lizzie Widdicombe, a reporter for the New Yorker, said it best “Meals provide punctuation to our lives: we’re constantly recovering from them, anticipating them, riding the emotional ups and downs of a good or a bad sandwich. With a bottle of soylent on your desk time stretches before you, featureless and a little sad” (Widdicombe). Widdicombe also sees that food adds emotion to our lives. Food is almost like a friend. Food is that someone you have good times with and bad times with. It’s something that picks you up or causes you to fall. Food adds emotion to your day and soylent can’t supply that emotion, or at least not for very long. Let’s also look at how food has made an impact through the generations of a family.
Think of all the family recipes that have been created and strengthened through the generations. Also, think of the emotion put into these meals. The hatred from war, the happiness from making it for a loved one or close friend, or the joy of creating something fantastic. These are things developed from an evolving recipe where the combinations to make a dish are endless. Soylent is a substance that is created from a limited ingredients list. Although, there still are combinations to be made with soylent and healthy foods those combinations are limited due to the health factor. Not all foods are healthy or mix well with raw nutrients such as magnesium-17. Let’s also look at religious feasts and festivities.
Christmas Dinner, Thanksgiving, Sabbath, Weddings, etc. All these festivities have some tie to a family. Each one made unique and special by a viewpoint of religion or family bond. We as humans relate food to an inner meaning and use holidays as a way of expressing that meaning. For example, my dad’s favorite meal, as mentioned in My Favorite Meal essay, is Thanksgiving. When I asked him what his favorite meal is he told me Thanksgiving and gave me a reason along with what the meal meant to him. His “favorite meal is Thanksgiving Dinner, with turkey and all the side dishes. All the meal is very good, everyone is relaxed, and all the family is together to enjoy it. It is a great meal and a great family atmosphere” (Fryzlewicz). My dad sees the inner purpose of Thanksgiving, a holiday based on food, as bringing families together and creating a relaxed atmosphere. Food creates that meaning in a holiday and helps create emotions in a family. Soylent cannot replace those family connections, and it cannot replace the unknown health factors in food either.
Science has always been evolving and finding new ways to combat real-world issues, like a disease. Food has played a large role in helping cure diseases, from scraps on a plate creating penicillin, to synthesizing cancer preventing cells found in the skins of certain fruits. Lizzy Widdicombe mentions the viewpoint of several doctors on soylent’s ability to sustain a human body. These doctors mentioned a substance found in plants called phytochemicals. These chemicals “appear to provide important health benefits. Lycopene, which makes tomatoes red, has been linked to lower rates of prostate cancer; flavonoid compounds, which make blueberries blue, have been associated with lower rates of diabetes” (Widdicombe). These phytochemicals are new findings with food, and
Humanity has always been creating cures and finding treatments to better our general health. Most of these health treatments are derived from plants, some even from foods we eat every day. The health benefits we obtain from foods are mainly due to phytochemicals. Lizzy Widdicombe mentions the viewpoint of several doctors on soylent’s ability to sustain a human body. These doctors mentioned a substance found in plants called phytochemicals. Phytochemicals “appear to provide important health benefits. Lycopene, which makes tomatoes red, has been linked to lower rates of prostate cancer; flavonoid compounds, which make blueberries blue, have been associated with lower rates of diabetes” (Widdicombe). These chemicals are the same things that Rhinehart does not include into his soylent. Rhinehart, after looking into phytochemicals, decided to not include them into his mixture claiming that they don’t “seem like an efficient use of resources” (Widdicombe). By leaving out these chemicals Rhinehart has excluded health benefits from his soylent. This is a bold move since these phytochemicals are a relatively new discovery.
Phytochemicals are a field that is relatively new to science, not a lot about them has been discovered. Yet, Rhinehart has already presumed that their purpose in food is not necessary for our general health and should be excluded from our diet. Walter Willett, chair of nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health, said: “It’s a little bit presumptuous to think that we actually know everything that goes into an optimally healthy diet” (Widdicombe). There are things in food that help us in fighting disease and aid in our metabolism that we haven’t discovered yet. Without the complete understanding of a healthy diet or the health factors in food it would be healthier for someone to stay with food, then to replace it. While someone is eating their Caesar salad they may be preventing a heart attack or cancer with every bite.
Soylent was created by Rob Rhinehart to solve the problem of food expense. He later realized its possibility as a food replacement, aiming the soylent to replace our junk food. This thought, although a nice one, was overly optimistic. The taste of eating unhealthy food, especially with friends trumps that of dough smelling sludge. Soylent is not coming for our Sunday potlucks, nor is it coming for our frozen quesadillas. Soylent will find its place with the other food substitutes from the past on the bottom shelf in the health foods aisle at Walmart. The thought that someone can shove the necessities, emotions, memories, generations of family preparation and the love of food into a blender was an overstatement. Food will always remain in our hearts and minds.
Works Cited
Widdicombe, Lizzie. “The End of Food.” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 19 June 2017, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/12/the-end-of-food.
Fryzlewicz, James. Personal Interview, 9 September 2018.
