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I tried explaining Soylent, the protein shake meal replacement popular in Silicon Valley, to my mom and she tilted her head: “Oh, you mean SlimFast?” she said.
I balked. No, Soylent is definitely tech, I explained, and it’s on my beat. It has a minimalist label and comes in iterative versions like software (we’re at Soylent 2.0). It has a young white male founder who philosophizes about it and connects it to broader themes of life efficiency and has raised $20m in venture capital funding on its promise of releasing us from the prison of food.
My mom shrugged and laughed. And suddenly I realized: she’s right.
Almost all Silicon Valley food innovation is just rebranding what women have been doing for decades. There’s nothing inherently different about Soylent from SlimFast at all. And yet SlimFast is low-brow, funny and a little sad. Soylent is cool, cutting-edge, brutally efficient and, here’s the key word: innovative, according to Quartz. Soylent gets the FastCompany profile yesterday. When I hear about Soylent, it’s almost as though SlimFast never existed, like Soylent emerged from the ether.
Because it’s made by and for men, now we call it tech.
Yesterday, there were two more stories about this food and Silicon Valley convergence – the booming new intersection of money, idealism and sustenance.
The New York Times has an un-skeptical piece about the founder of a $700 juice box that doesn’t juice but rather squeezes a pre-packaged juice bag into a glass. That box’s founder, Doug Evans, has raised $120m from prestigious Silicon Valley firms, including Google Ventures and Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers.
“Mr. Evans and his investors speak of Juicero being a ‘platform’ for a new paradigm of food delivery,” The Times’s David Gelles writes. “Investors ... have little more [to go on] than Mr. Evans’s enthusiasm for juice. He drinks it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. He is so committed to a largely liquid diet that he rarely consumes water.”
And then BuzzFeed has one about a mostly-male intermittent fasting club.
“WeFa.st is an online community made up mostly of tech workers, all of whom share a fascination with intermittent fasting, which dictates a strict schedule for fasting and eating in exchange for a host of health benefits,” BuzzFeed’s Nitasha Tiku writes. “These mostly young, mostly male, hype men for biohacking have built an ethos around the diet, which promises peak productivity and readiness for a future where technology is king and the smartest man wins.”
There is obviously a tech angle to both of these stories. Certainly venture capitalists putting $120m into a juice startup is a story, but the question is what kind of story.
Hampton Creek, another “food technology company” that’s raised $120m at a $500m valuation on the promise of an egg-free world, was exposed to be little more than pea protein and good packaging.
This brings me back to Soylent, a powder sold as a complete replacement for all food that has become the pinnacle of the food-tech hype. I read through founder Rob Rhinehart’s website again this morning.
Rhinehart recently wrote about how good he felt no longer needing a kitchen: “This home manufacturing center has been by far the most liberating to eliminate.”
Tech has become a brand unto itself, a veneer to rub onto otherwise boring, domestic business (protein shakes, a crummy juicer).
SlimFast is for women, and it’s boring.
Soylent, though? I bet they’re raising another round.
