Uh oh — it’s winter and I’m thinking about Soylent again

Hello,

This is the weirdest week of the year when comes to time and space.

It’s even weirder this year with all the Omnicron running around.

It’s a week where people are off from work, or not, or sort of, I just need to do a few things except oh geez wow my boss sent another email.

It’s a week where people are in different spaces then they are usually — childhood bedrooms, the homes of significant other’s extended family, other people’s air mattresses. Or maybe exactly where you always are but hyperconscious of how you could be somewhere else, ideally with others, family or not.

At any rate, time and space gets pretty weird in this week of the year — there’s simultaneously too much and not enough of either.

And as we’ve all learned in some form or another, long before the pandemic, in the middle of the pandemic, or you know, over and over again, weirdness and time in space often leads to one basic human certainty:

DEPRESSION. :)

—

For me, winter depression often means spending significant time on the Soylent Reddit boards.

This is not a coping mechanism I am proud of.

To be precise, I’m talking about the DIY Soylent message boards, where amateur nutritionists argue about shipping for the most cost efficient magnesium powder.

There is something hideously appealing to me about these message boards, a place where a product w zero redeeming qualities besides “efficiency” is biohacked into even further efficiency —excess, decadent levels of efficiency.

A little nightmare of a community where people share spreadsheets and vitamin grinding tips, trying to get the absolute best value Homemade Soylent in terms of nutrition and cost.

I lurk on these boards when time and space gets weird, but not because I am interested in buying Soylent or making my own.

Instead, this compulsion hits when I am consumed by my inefficiencies as a human.

The ludicrous emphasis on optimization on this subreddit, far past normal reasonable metrics of productivity or health.

I do not spend 99.9% of my life in ketosis.

I am unable to optimize my biological need for B12 to the well priced percentage.

These vitamin oriented issues are not failures of efficiency I am particularly bothered by. So the discussion on these message boards puts the inefficiencies I am bothered by in perspective.

—

Unfortunately I have written about Soylent before. It’s easy. Soylent is ridiculous.

Soylent is so over the top in its existence — a “Work as God” a tech monk product like the weird apartments where you pay $3000 for a bunkbed, or coworking spaces.

If you start a conversation about Soylent, which I wouldn’t recommend because everyone usually wants to end it immediately, everyone tends to agree Soylent is… weird, at best. At least we can all agree on that.

—

I just finished “The secret life of groceries” by Benjamin Orr, a book about all the different and excited ways the grocery supply chain is wrecked.

In the book, Orr interviews the real “Trader Joe,” a number of truck drivers, a woman in Thailand who is straight up burning down slave labor shrimp farms, and a number of organic or “buy local” type suppliers. These interviews support his thesis: condemning our wrecked supply chain, the egregious human suffering it contains, can be turned towards marketing.

Food marketing, he says, is about manufacturing identity. How we want to project our identity to the rest of the world.

Since everything makes me think about Soylent when I’m depressed, Orr’s book made me think about Soylent too.

What identity, what story are we telling about ourselves, when we consume food that isn’t food at all?

—

In Methland, another nonfiction book about fucked up supply chains, but this time in a legal one, the author describes meth as the quintessential American drug.

According to Methland, Meth is Americana.

Meth helps you work harder, longer, and more cheerfully (whether or not ‘cheerful’ is an apt descriptor of meth’s impact is up for debate but beside the point).

Soylent is similar to meth in this way: a way to save time, energy, productivity, your quality of life, (or as the masculinity influencers I used to buy vitamins from would say, TOTAL HUMAN OPTIMIZATION).

Soylent, a food so efficient that it isn’t food at all, is maybe the most American food.

At the end of “the secret life of groceries,” Orr nods to the fact that though his book is a searing indictment of the grocery industry, it follows a formula for identity based marketing just like everything else. (Investigative journalism certainly isn’t a big moneymaker, but it doesn’t mean they can ignore marketing.)

“The closer we look at our food, the idea is, the more disgusting it will turn out to be. And this always seems to be the case! There is always some new horror, and there will always be another book about another horror,” Orr says.

According to the muckraking food book marketing formula, in Orr’s conclusion there should be some finger-pointing, a demand for serious reform. A little bit of shaming of the reader/consumer, with the added imperative to do something, TAKE ACTION.

But instead of including a URL to a petition against Whole Foods to build his list and drive book sales, Orr says this—

In any kind of food health or wellness marketing, the product sold to the consumer is efficiency.

What we can’t account for, Orr argues, is what we do with all that efficiency — the time saved, the greater capacity for self development.

—

The pandemic disrupted a lot of global supply chains, including the ones marketing the Optimized Worker as an Identity.

The idea that we should “slow down“ “acknowledge nuance” and not be defined by our work, status, other capitalist metrics is culturally ubiquitous in 2021 in a way it was not when Orr’s book was published in 2019 — only a few years ago, but pre-pandemic, another time and space melting experience.

What I find most interesting about Orr’s refusal to abide by the American muckraking book formula, his refusal to Call The Reader To Take Action, is that it is wildly inefficient.

It’s a weird way to end a book, particularly one where there are many tangible things that could be changed in our food system that could make it work, if not better, certainly slightly less evil-y.

By basically throwing his hands up and shrugging at the end of this book, Orr demonstrates that “Any solution will come from outside our food system, so far outside that thinking about food may actually just be a distraction from the real work to be done.”

This rethinking is one he finds as hopeful as it is depressing. “We are in a dialogue with this world, not at its mercy,” he says.

Reading this, even without a clear path forward, makes me feel hopeful, just like Orr says.

So, in this week where we are all struggling with time and space, I hope that you get a chance to reflect, to feel things, to fuck around without any moral spiritual personal or professional obligation towards growth and development.

Wishing you and everyone a wildly inefficient end to 2022,

-H

*Especially the people on the Soylent DIY message boards, but… they’re on their own journey.