The 7 Weirdest Claims in the Soylent Creator's New Manifesto

Soylent, the food alternative for people who hate eating, just launched its newest iteration, Soylent 2.0. The new version features two big changes: a shift from rice to soy as its major protein source and, for the first time, it will come pre-bottled. This is great news if you loved Soylent 1.0 because you were too lazy to cook. Now you can be too lazy to mix.

Soylent 2.0 arrives with a 2,800-word manifesto from creator Rob Rhinehart about living a simpler life — free of irritations like alternating current electricity and kitchens. While a portion of Rhinehart’s post is devoted to what a disaster he believes the American power grid to be, we’ll leave that be since we’re certainly not power plant experts. Some of the other claims about cooking, driving and clothing, though, seem… well… you can see for yourself.

1. On his newly empty kitchen: “My home is a place of peace. I don’t want to live with red-hot heating elements and razor-sharp knives.”
If you feel a room is transformed into a den of violence by a chef’s knife resting in a wooden block, you might be wound a little too tightly to cook anyway.

2. On cooking: “We suck at cooking and we suck at driving. Let’s focus on art and science and exploration.”
Ok, first of all, we can’t suck at cooking that much. We’ve managed to sustain ourselves with it for about 2 million years. And there’s no way the number of people who suck at cooking is any larger than the number of people who suck at art.

3. On drinking: He has switched from beer to red wine, noting, “when wine is consumed instead of beer there is less electrolyte loss and less after effects.”
If this is a major part of his drinking calculus, he’s doing drinking wrong. You want to avoid hangovers? Maybe just stick to Soylent full time.

4. On transportation: “I take Uber around the city and to work. Most of them are Priuses.”
Are they? Really? Maybe they are, but Uber doesn’t even give those numbers out.

5. On clothes shopping: “I get my clothing custom made in China for prices you would not believe. “
This is not, itself, a weird claim. Putting it on a list of things you are doing to positively impact the world is, though. But it's nice Rhinehart doesn't have to buy off the rack.

6. On food shopping: Grocery shopping is a “living nightmare” that he could not “in good conscience put another soul through.”
The Manhattan Trader Joe’s aside, grocery shopping is not exactly the most stress-inducing activity you could undertake. We’d guess that making clothes in a Chinese factory is a bit more unpleasant.

7. On laundry: “Thanks to synthetic fabrics it takes less water to make my clothes than to wash them, and I donate my used garments.”
Why do laundry when you can just buy new clothes? It’s great that it doesn’t take much water to make a pair of synthetic jeans, but it probably takes a few other things, you know: fuel to move them 7,000 miles across an ocean, human labor to make them — things like that.

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