The Flight From Food

A meal in a pill?  It’s been a lingering human dream for a long  time. It’s also been regularly contested.  L. Frank Baum created professor Wogglebug who had invented a tablet-meal.  His students were no fans. They hogtied and tossed him into a river.  

Recently, young entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley reversed the student sentiment.  They came up with, not a pill, but a drink, Soylent.   Why substitute Soylent for real food? Time, money, nutrition, according to their web site.   

Let’s face it, such considerations make a kind of sense, at least within a venerable philosophical trajectory.   It’s label is dualism: we are composed of two oppositional elements, mind and  body.  One (mind) is essential, i.e. our main defining trait. The other, (body) is accidental, i.e. an accompaniment, but not crucial to who we are.

As is typical for philosophy, once a general orientation takes hold, the real change is not initially with answers, but with newly invented questions. Some examples within dualism:  If a computer can think, does that make it a person?  Can minds (carbon-based thus far) be downloadable into a silicon based network? In other words, can humans, having moved beyond their limited bodily state, live forever?  A movement called “transhumanism” thinks this is within reach.

Dualism also occasions particular food-related questions.  Eating might provide pleasurable bodily diversions but as long as we get our nutrition somehow, why not move beyond traditional eating, especially if this saves time and money in the bargain?

Here, as we saw above, is where Soylent makes its  pitch.  Just as the transhumanist believes that minds can be separated from bodies, so the fans of Soylent believe that nutrition can be separated from eating whole foods. “Free your body,” says the Soylent web site. Real meaning: “free yourself from your body.” Or,  to push the point further, “free yourself from typical animal-like modes of feeding, and thus move to a higher, less contaminated, human level of existence.” 

Rob Rhinehart, pioneer in Soylent’s development, explicitly referenced the need to break from our animal dimension. He was 6 or 7 years old, eating a salad. "I was looking down at a plate with these leaves on it. I could look outside and see leaves on the trees, and it just seemed a little weird. It seemed a little primitive--like something an animal would do. On this nice plate, in this nice house, why would I eat this thing that grows on trees? I thought 'We can do better.'''
This last phrase, “we can do better,” can be understood in a number of ways.  It can be read, as Rhinehart does, oppositionally.  We must struggle against our physiological (animal) side.  But, “doing better” can also be read transformatively.  Cooking, an activity specific to us, is one way we live our humanity. Animals eat plants. We eat plants. Animals eat meat. We eat meat.  
The basic activity is similar, but with a twist. We cook. We flavor, we sit around with other people, we talk, we clean up.  Here, “we can do better,” means embracing the kind of creature we are; seeking the consummations proper to us.  We do not succumb to an old temptation: seeking to escape our condition. 

Philosophically, it’s about our general attitude toward how we understand ourselves.  Do we follow the bifurcated path that automatically opposes our physiological and psychological sides?   Or, do we embrace our psychological/physiological mix and the fulfillments proper to it?

 Soylent’s supporters embrace the former. When Rhinehart asks “why would  I eat this thing that grows on trees” he shows how much he has bought into the oppositional philosophy.  By contrast, when we focus on cooking, not as a detachable annoyance, but  as central to who we are, we can emphasize continuity with a difference. This represents neither a sharp opposition, nor a simple absorption into the realm of other animals.

The older philosophy privileged opposition.  It sought to break free.  Break free from the chores surrounding cooking for the Soylent crowd; from a bodily limit to life, for the transhumanists. In both cases, the deeper dream was an escape from who we are.   A better  philosophy would not seek an escape. Rather it would seek out appropriate consummations for the kind of complex creature we are.  It would embrace real food, not meals in a pill or in a glass.