Soylent cuisine: the trendy new food substitute is made by people and for people--not of people.

• Author: Beato, Greg

REMEMBER WHEN the planet's young people--or at least its youth-oriented jingle writers--almost convinced us that a bottle of Coca-Cola could play a pivotal role in achieving global harmony? While the "real thing" may have been a balm against the stings of Vietnam and other afflictions of the era, today's youthful idealists understand it will take a lot more than proprietary sugar-water and some attractive teenagers singing on a hilltop to combat melting polar ice caps, rising income inequality, and everything else that ails us. We need a genuine miracle elixir, not just a pause that refreshes.

Enter Soylent, the gulp that sustains. Its primary components are a powder made from maltodextrin, rice protein, oat flour, and more vitamins and minerals than mid-century food scientists ever managed to pack into a loaf of Wonder Bread, plus a liquid blend of canola oil and fish oil. Mix the powder with the oil, add water, and that's it. Soylent is almost as easy to prepare as a glass of Coca-Cola, and yet it is designed to function as a "staple meal" that offers "maximum nutrition with minimal effort."

Soylent, in other words, is simultaneously an antidote to both Monster Thickburgers and locavorist gospel. Similar products, such as Ensure and Slim-Fast, have been on the market for years, but they're filled with objectionable Big Food ingredients like sugar and sucralose and targeted at geriatrics, dieters, and other specialty audiences. Soylent pairs optimized molybdenum uptake with a message of low-impact environmental sustainability. ("I almost forgot to mention, when everything going in to your body is diffused into the bloodstream, you don't poop," advises Soylent creator Rob Rhinehart in a blog post. "I only have to remove a few grams of fiber from my system per week.") And yet while processed food prohibitionists like Michael "Mostly Plants" Pollan demonize convenience, affordability, and technology, Soylent supersizes these attributes in ways that might even scare Ronald McDonald fiberless.

Weaned on Go-Gurt and home-butchered urban chickens, millennials came of age amidst the ever-present specters of the "obesity epidemic" and climate change. They're inundated with food choices, and yet constantly reminded that the food choices they make have political, economic, nutritional, environmental, aesthetic, ethical, and social consequences. Is that hamburger destroying wetlands somewhere? Oppressing migrant labor? Is it interesting enough to post...