Soylent's founder hawks new drink in spiel on solar living

Feel too busy to cook, or can't seem to master the art of not eating junk? You've probably heard of Soylent, then, the meal-replacement drink that promises to meet all your nutritional needs and not taste entirely terrible while doing so. Whether it fulfills its promise if debatable, but that's not the topic of creator Rob Rhinehart's latest blog post. In a long statement today, he detailed his efforts to reduce his environmental footprint, embrace solar, and more. All in all it's an interesting enough read...right up until it turns into a Soylent advertisement.

Rhinehart took to his website recently to detail some environment factoids and his efforts to decrease his impact on the environment. They're well intentioned, though not entirely sound, and maybe for some even inspirational, but a big component is the part that most of us probably won't be considering, at least not on this side of the apocalypse — ditching food.

Says Rhinehart, "Kitchens are expensive and dirty." He also says that it only takes a couple life hacks to make a kitchen "totally unnecessary", and as you may guess, Soylent — in this case, the new Soylent 2.0 — is one of those life hacks.

Rhinehart gave up cooking and used the money he saves on groceries to eat out instead. Unlike the last version, Soylent 2.0 doesn't need to be refrigerated, and while he says it tastes better cold, you can go ahead and ditch your fridge and get all your sustenance from warm food-drink and restaurants instead.

His other methods of more sustainable living include ordering stuff online to avoid "awful retail stores", a butane stove for warming water, and ordering Uber cars instead of driving. All of which are fine if that's your cup of tea, though none of them are going to stem the rising tides of climate change.

It all falls apart at the point where food-drink is hawked as part of our more sustainable future — one where we don't need the fridge (or as large of a fridge) because we're drinking warm grog instead. If that does sound appealing to you, there's the new Soylent 2.0, which Rhinehart quips that, unlike his other green life trappings, isn't available on Amazon.

SOURCE: Rob Rhinehart