Summary Of The End Of Food

Throughout time, the development of food in the areas of tasting, feeling, seeing, etc. has grown into the incredible conglomerates that everyone sees today. The question stands, could this all be coming to an end? In the article, The End of Food by Lizzie Widdicombe, Rob Rhinehart and his “nerdy boy band” (pg. 7) believe that they have developed the ultimate meal of the future. The only meal of the future. This meal is a combination of thirty-five key nutrients mixed into one giant shake known as Soylent. This Soylent was the mostly the only thing that Rhinehart has been living off of for the past year and a half. He believes that in the near future everyone will be living solely off of Soylent. In fact, Rhinehart joked that his refrigerator;
You not only use the seeing and tasting of food, but the parts of the day that they represented. On page 14, Lizzie Widdecombe stated “You begin to realize how much of your day revolves around food. Meals provide punctuation to our lives: we’re constantly recovering from them, anticipating them, riding the emotional ups and downs of a good or a bad sandwich.” (pg. 14) As a student at Lebanon Valley College, I could only come to think about what this would mean for Mund, Metz, The C-Store, and Bishop’s Brew. First, all of those places would be replaced if we only relied upon the Soylent shake. Secondly, the interactions and conversations will disappear. People will not sit around in Mund to just drink a shake, rather they stay now for the food and for their friends. If you eat all of your meals in Mund, you could say everything that is eaten and discussed adds up to at least two hours of your day. That chunk now needs to be replaced, and knowing college-students it will either be with napping, Netflix binge watching, or, hopefully, studying. I believe that the loss of this time, the loss of our own aesthetic pleasure with food will destroy an important part of everyone’s life. Going back to the Soylent shake, the idea that comes from Rhinehart was seen as an efficient substitute to saving time and money. He saw that his work was much more important than pleasing himself
Overall, this ethically sounds like an amazing creation that could help millions of people. Rhinehart is a proven example of what could happen if people give these shakes a shot. Now I ask, are they aesthetically worth it? Backtracking to the beginning of these argument, will people let go of their guilty pleasures, their free will, for something that tastes like pancake batter? No, but yes at the same time. I do not believe that the shake will ever become everyone’s one sole meal for every meal time. Rather, people will use the Soylent shake when it is efficient or available to them. The realization is food will always be apart of us. The aesthetic pleasures will always be apart of us. Everyone loves when their food comes out of the kitchen, and is presented to them in an amazing fashion. Everyone loves going to Mund and enjoying a meal with their close friends or even sometimes strangers. Food and Soylent shakes can combine to be amazing replacements of one another, but in the end, when I want to take someone out on a date, I would much rather take her out to get real food over a “gooey lemonade” (pg. 2)