Soylent: The End

I have not worked on my food stamp friendly soylent substitute in several years, and I do not currently have any plans to continue.  I would like to explain why, for anyone interested who might want to try their hand at this.

Initially the project went pretty well, though one thing that bothers me is that I had to rely heavily on a nutrition shake mix for the base.  The ideal mix would have had only common, basic ingredients.  Unfortunately, that is really hard to achieve in only dry ingredients at a reasonable price point.  There are people working on "whole food" full nutrition drinks, but these almost always rely heavily on perishable ingredients.  It is practically impossible to come up with a good dry mix without using some kind of nutritional supplement, in the form of actual multivitamins or nutrition drink power.

Another major problem was price point.  It is possible to maintain a healthy diet on around 30¢ a meal (as low as 18¢, if you live in the right place).  My goal was to get the price below $1.00 a meal.  I don't think I ever achieved that (though I don't actually recall anymore).  Dry ingredients are just expensive.  According to some sources, the average American spends $250 a month on food, which is $2.74 a meal, on average, so I did manage to get my price below the average that Americans pay, but that is still not a reasonable price for people on food stamps.  That said, some of my recipes did manage to have fairly low prices.

Unfortunately, flavor was also an issue, as well as texture.  The official Soylent brand product used oat flour early on, as did all of my recipes.  Unfortunately, oat flour has two problems.  One is that its texture isn't great for this kind of thing.  Another is that it has a slightly bad aftertaste.  The aftertaste can be reduced, by mixing it the day before and refrigerating overnight, but this is inconvenient, which defeats a significant part of the point.  Also, some people trying the Soylent brand products with oat flour found it caused digestive issues, and likely my recipes would have as well.  The flavor issue was mostly related to vitamin K, which it turns out is hard to find.  I used basil for the vitamin K, but this made the flavor taste slightly off.  There are not a lot of good sources of vitamin K that are cheap and don't cause flavor issues.  The basil flavor didn't bother me a lot, but it was strong enough that most people probably wouldn't like it.  I did manage some more palatable recipes, but price scaled with taste quality, making the better tasting recipes pretty expensive.

The last problem was macro nutrient balance, specifically the types of carbs.  Based on some research done in Australia, I came up with a pretty decent macro nutrient balance, with fat, protein, and carbs, in a higher fat configuration shown to be good for maintaining lower weight and feeling fuller after eating.  Unfortunately, most of my carbs came from oat flour and some corn starch, which turned out to be bad for hypoglycemic people (like myself).  I would consistently get headaches within an hour of drinking a full meal.  Some of this may have been related to chemicals in the oat flour (the same ones that cause the bad aftertaste), but most was probably due to low blood sugar.  I was not able to actually test my blood sugar, but the symptoms were similar to headaches I get from low blood sugar.  Soylent brand resolved a very similar issue with their product by replacing a lot of the carbs with isomaltulose, a sugar that breaks down very slowly.  Unfortunately, isomaltulose is not something you can find in stores, which means it is not available on food stamps.  Another option was raw starch.  It turns out most corn starch is actually cooked during processing, which breaks down the starch chains into something very easily digestible, and that means it has a high glycemic index.  Raw starches (resistant starches) have longer chains, which take much longer to break down.  I did manage to obtain some raw potato starch, but unfortunately, it is an expensive specialty product.  I never actually tried it in a recipe, because I calculated the price using it, and it was significantly worse.  In addition, the amount of starch in the existing recipes was already on the edge of giving it an undesirable starchy texture, and this would definitely have pushed it over the edge.  So, in the end, I never managed a recipe that would work well for me, because of the blood sugar issue.

This was an enjoyable project.  I learned a ton about nutrition, including how incredibly poorly we actually understand it, and how incredibly wrong a lot of the common wisdom is.  It was definitely worth my time, but it was still unsuccessful.  The above reasons explain most of why I am done with this project, but there is one more reason: Walmart now carries Soylent brand products.  The price is still excessively high, but they can be purchased on food stamps, and they are superior in every way but price to my own recipes.  The amount of research, on paletability and safety that has gone into Soylent far exceeds my own research.  They have also managed to eliminate most, if not all of the gastrointestinal problems earlier versions often caused.  There honestly isn't much point in my continued efforts, especially when I have so many other projects to work on.

So, I hope Soylent brand's prices eventually drop to something more reasonable, but I am done with this.  It was a good run, and I learned a lot, but this isn't a project worth putting any more of my time into, at this point.  And while it might be expensive, Soylent managed to beat me to the punch, with products that can be bought on food stamps.