Is Soylent Really That Great?

Soylent (Rob's Soylent, which is trademarked as Soylent) has a lot of advantages.  It is very convenient, especially in the pre-mixed bottled form.  It is, theoretically, nutritionally complete (so far as we currently understand nutrition).  It is also pretty cheap at $2.50 a meal.  Most people cannot see the mistake here.  It is true that Soylent is convenient and healthy, but the claim of cheapness is a misguided lie.  $2.50 is not actually cheap for a meal.

Consider, I can go to Taco Bell, buy two bean burritos, and spend about that much.  That is about as cheap as fast food gets, but this is fast food, not cheap food.  Fast food is always expensive.  Two bean burritos is about as cheap as you can get for fast food, it is pretty filling, and you are still paying someone else to advertise it, make it, sell it, and serve it to you, which adds quite a lot of overhead.

So, how cheap would Soylent have to be for me to consider it a cheap meal?  At $1.50, I could admit that it was approaching cheap.  For it to be truly cheap though, it would have to cost $1.00 or less per meal.

I have evidence!  First, I have created my own food stamp friendly soylent recipes.  I don't recall any of them costing $2.50 a meal, and they are all as nutritionally complete as Rob's Soylent.  My soylents have more texture and flavor, which might be off-putting to some, and they are made from real food ingredients (that can all be bought on food stamps).  Mixing them is certainly more work, but the prices per meal range from around $2.20 down to $1.50 and possibly a lot less (it has been a while, so I don't recall exact prices anymore though I think the closest I got to a dollar was $1.15).  Further, this is not even buying the ingredients in bulk.  Industrial bulk rates could at least half the ingredient costs, and while I don't know all of the costs that would go into mass production, I am sure I could beat Rob's Soylent prices by at least 20¢ if not by more than $1.00.  This is not all though!

The cheapest way to get food is in bulk, and then make it yourself at home.  One of Soylent's true benefits is convenience.  The newest versions come premixed and bottled, reducing the work to opening the box and storing the bottles, and then taking out the bottles, shaking them, opening them, and drinking them.  You cannot get much more convenient than that (without an IV...)!  I cannot beat that with bulk foods, but I can get a lot closer than most people would imagine.

One of the cheapest foods you can get that has decent nutritional value is rice.  Enough rice for a meal for one person can be incredibly cheap, and it can even be quite cheap when using more expensive rice.  For example, a 25 pound bag of extra long grained rice (about the lowest quality) costs $8.64 at our local Sam's Club.  This is about 178 meals worth of rice (a meal is around 0.14 pounds, or 1/3 of a cup of dry rice).  This is only 5¢ a meal!  This is not very good rice though, and if this stuff is so cheap, maybe you can afford something better, like jasmine rice or basmati rice.  Sam's basmati rice is $20.98 for 25 pounds, and while this might seem way more expensive, it still only comes out to 12¢ per meal.  Jasmine rice comes out to 6¢ or 10¢ a meal, depending on brand and availability (I have only seen the 10¢ per meal brand at our local club).  Fake Japanese rice (Calrose rice, bred and grown in California) comes out to less than 9¢ a meal from Sam's.  We recently got a bag of Calrose sushi rice from Winco for less than $30, so even cheaper sushi rice only costs 17¢ per meal, and even though it is not authentic Japanese rice,  the Calrose rice and sushi rice both have more flavor than western varieties.  Rice is incredibly cheap food!  While there are other grains that are even cheaper, rice is one of the best for just cooking and eating whole.

Of course, no one wants to eat just rice for every meal.  The Japanese, who have mastered the art of cooking and eating rice, prefer to leave the rice plain and eat it with small amounts of strongly flavored toppings.  Traditional toppings include spicy cod roe and natto, a type of fermented soybeans that have such a strong smell that even many Japanese people don't like it (most still eat it for the nutritional benefits).  These can be hard to find in the U.S. though, so you can start with some other popular toppings.  Some Japanese people season their rice with a sprinkling of salt, and nothing else.  Because Japanese rice is more flavorful than western rices, this can be pretty satisfying, though I would not expect anyone to eat it for every meal.  A slightly more flavorful topping, called furikake, is a mixture of salt, nori (seaweed) flakes, and sesame seeds, blended a bit, and it often contains other ingredients as well.  Sprinkled on top of a bowl of rice, this makes a more flavorful meal than just salted rice, and it is almost as cheap, but again, I think it would get old if eaten constantly.  A less popular, but still common topping that might be more palatable to Americans is a small amount flaked (cooked) fish, like tuna (traditionally Ahi or Yellowfin, but canned tuna works as well).  Many Japanese people even like to mix this with mayonnaise to make a simple tuna salad, and then they top their rice with just a dollop (traditionally, the topping on Japanese rice is not much more than a tablespoon in size, except with natto, which is served in several tablespoons, and furikake or salt, which is lightly sprinkled).  Unless you are buying natto or cod roe from an Asian store in the U.S., the topping typically costs around 10¢ or less, giving you a meal for under 30¢.  Even the most expensive topping in the U.S., the cod roe, is unlikely to cost you more than 25¢, unless you use way too much.  In any case, for a moderately fancy Japanese every day meal, using inauthentic American grown sushi rice, you can spend well under 50¢ a meal.  A single bottle of Soylent, at $2.50, will cost you more than a day and a half worth of this food.  That is pretty expensive!  Now, I want to talk briefly about convenience.  Japanese rice is not as easy to prepare as western rice.  It is somewhat more sticky, and if you don't rinse it before cooking, you can end up with a gummy mess.  Rinsing is not too difficult.  You can get by with a few minutes of sloshing water around with the rice, running your hands through it, and draining and refilling when the water gets milky.  Once the rice starts to feel smooth and very little milkiness is coming off into the water, you put the amount of water recommended by your rice cooker in, soak it for 30 minutes to 8+ hours (it is common to soak the rice overnight so it is ready for breakfast), then start the rice cooker.  If you prepare 3 meals worth all at once, the rinsing time is not increased much, and you only have to do it once for the day.  You could even do more than this, and refrigerate the leftovers, to get several days in at once, if your rice cooker is big enough, and the cooked rice can even be frozen, without losing too much quality.  Overall, it is certainly less convenient than Soylent, but it is not that much, and it can be minimized.  Most of the toppings either don't need to be prepared or can be prepared in large amounts at once fairly quickly.  The tuna salad is the exception, and it is easy enough to mix enough for a whole day in a few minutes (one can of tuna is plenty), or you could mix two days worth and refrigerate it (much more than this and you risk it going bad).

Because Japanese rice is sticky, it is not as suitable for some popular western toppings as western varieties of rice.  On average, the western topping will be more expensive and time consuming, but they will also be easier to find.  Perhaps one of the most popular rice toppings is curry.  Starting with curry powder (instead of a more expensive bottled mix), it is fairly easy to make a cheap curry sauce to go on your rice.  There are plenty of recipes online, but a good curry sauce can be made with curry powder, some oil (or heavy cream, if you have it), cumin, salt, and a dash of cayenne (take it easy though, this stuff is powerful).  This is cheap to make and adds some great flavor to the rice.  In addition, pretty much all spices and herbs are loaded with vitamins and mineral, so this is a pretty healthy meal.  By itself, rice does not provide all of the types of protein humans need.  One solution is to make a serious curry.  There are plenty of curry recipes that include chicken or other meats, and if you keep track of costs and ration the curry, you can keep your meal cheap without sacrificing too much.  Keep in mind, you do not need that much protein to survive, and if you diet is already heavy in rice, you are already getting plenty, just not all of the right types.  A little bit of meat now and then will take care of this easily.  If your curry is going to be too expensive, you can probably half the meat without a problem.  Curry is not the only good rice topping.  You can make many different kinds of sauce, and if you always go light on the sauce, you can eat quite well, without spending more than $1 a meal.  One favorite that I have yet to try is lobster sauce.  Yes, you can make a decent lobster sauce on rice for less than $1 per meal.  Lobster has a lot of flavor.  A lobster tail that costs $16 (our regular local price at this time) can make enough sauce for 50 meals, if you use it right.  The first thing you need to do is use it in very small portions, freezing the rest in between.  In addition, take some of the shell as well, because the shell contains a lot of the flavor.  Boil the meat and the shell together, and keep the water as a stock for your sauce.  You can discard the shell at this point.  Then you break up the meat fairly small, and make a sauce from the stock.  If you make the right amount of sauce for the lobster you used, each meal should cost only 32¢ in lobster, probably around 5¢ for the rest of sauce ingredients, and even with the expensive Jasmine rice, one meal totals 47¢.  If you replace the lobster with cheap salad shrimp or something slightly larger, you can easily half that price, if you ration the shrimp right.  The thing to keep in mind is that you don't need a lot of the expensive ingredient.  You need enough to get the flavor and maybe one or two small pieces per meal.  In a pinch, you can tear or even blend the expensive ingredient to more evenly distribute the ingredient and its flavor.  Of course, often you don't even need to use an expensive ingredient, and your sauce can cost as little as the rice itself, providing a decent meal for less than 20¢.  While western rice is not generally good enough to eat by itself, it is cheaper and it is easier to top.  The cost is that preparation time is much more for the topping.

There is one more option, for the epitome of cheapness: Beans and rice.  The cheapest rice you can get in 25 pound bags (from Sam's Club, anyhow) costs 5¢ per meal.  Buying in small one pound bags, a serving of pinto beans (and you really only need one if you are eating with a meal worth of rice) costs about 15¢.  If you buy in bulk (25 pound bag from Sam's), you can expect 4¢ a serving, which is what we will use here.  This is a half decent meal for only 9¢!  You will need a bit more than this to make it palatable though.  We will look at convenience at the same time.  Making cheap rice (that does not need rinsed) takes all of 1 minute, depending on the layout of your kitchen.  You measure the rice into the cooker, then you add water, then you turn on the cooker.  At this point the beans should already be done, because they take a lot longer.  Thankfully, they don't take much more work.  You will need a crock pot in addition to the rice cooker.  The beans are soaked in the crock pot (no heat) overnight.  This prepares them for cooking and improves their flavor and texture.  In the morning, the water is drained, new water is added along with some seasoning, and the crock pot is turned on.  The beans should be ready by evening.  The seasonings are what makes beans and rice good.  They also make it healthier.  Neither beans nor rice contain all of the proteins humans need in their diet, but together they do, which makes them a perfect combination.  Add a reasonable variety of spices and herb, and you have a fairly nutritionally complete meal that also tastes good.  Of course, the seasonings add to the price, so you are not going to get this for only 9¢, but because seasonings are used in such small amounts, it is not going to add much, unless you are using something like saffron, where the smallest pinch costs several dollars.  If you stick to reasonable seasonings, you should spend between 1¢ and 3¢ on flavor, for a maximum price of 12¢ per meal.  The only way you  can do better than this is buy in larger bulk, and if you know where to look, you can find both rice and beans in 100 pound or larger lots, that will save significant amounts of money, and even seasonings can generally be bought in bulk containers.  It is probably possible to get your food prices down to 8¢ or even 6¢ per meal, if you are willing to eat the same food a lot, and if you have enough room to store all of that bulk food.

Soylent is great in lot of ways, but price is certainly not one of those ways.  I have demonstrated that we can get our food costs down to 12¢ a meal, using ingredients with known prices.  The money for one Soylent meal could provide 20 cheaper meals at these prices (almost a week of food).  Even if we allow significantly more flexibility, including the use of "luxury foods" like lobster, the best Soylent can do is the price of 5 of our cheap meals.  And, we can be even more flexible, if we note that our serving of beans only cost 4¢, and even if we double that, add two tortillas and a few slices of cheese, we are still well under $1 per meal.  Soylent is certainly more convenient than any of our cheap foods (though not much more, in a few cases), it does provide more complete nutrition (though not by a large margin), and it is cheaper than most fast food, but for anyone willing to do the math and eat cheaply, home cooked food can be way cheaper than Soylent, and even without too much additional inconvenience.  If Soylent ever gets down to $1 a meal, that's when I will start taking it seriously as a cheap food replacement.  As it is, it is way too expensive for me (which does not mean I will not try it when I can afford it)!