Paper short abstract:

Soylent is a nutritionally complete powdered food designed by a Bay Area software engineer to “free your body” from the drudgery of traditional food. Marketed as a tool to increase productivity, Soylent signals food’s implication in disciplining the body-as-machine in a post-Fordist context.

Paper long abstract:

Created by Bay Area software engineer Robert Rhinehart in 2013, Soylent is a powdered food substitute that promises to replace the need to eat traditional foods. Because the user needs only to combine the powder with water in a blender and priced at just $2.42 per meal, Soylent claims to "free your body" from the drudgery of food by creating a product designed to increase productivity in reducing the time, money, and effort typically spent on preparing and consuming conventional foods. Rhinehart designed Soylent to contain "optimal" nutrition for most bodies at minimal cost and effort, such that people could use Soylent to replace all other foods—to "never worry about food again," as Soylent's tagline puts it. This paper places the "optimization of the body" in a post-Fordist context. By inviting users to view themselves in terms of time and money, Soylent provides a site through which to study the intersection of food, bodies, and labor in the neoliberal US. Though optimizing the body for productivity is nothing new, I follow the shifting forms of discipline out of the Taylorist factory and into what I term a kind of "Taylorization of the self," or a "scientific self-management." The notion of body-as-machine reflected in Soylent configures the worker not as an alienated "cog in the machine," but as an alterable bundle of "code" that can be flexibly rewritten, much like a computer. In this way, Soylent also reconceptualizes agency in a way that corresponds with a neoliberal imaginations of citizenship.