Showing posts with label post-food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label post-food. Show all posts

Wednesday, 21 May 2014

Goo food

I didn't just forget the 'd' on the title of this blog. There are people drinking nutritional goo instead of eating normal food. It seems to be a movement. I understand that buying food, storing it, preparing it, eating it and then cleaning up can be time consuming; an interruption to doing things you prefer to do... I'm often frustrated by it. But not so much that I would resort to drinking goo, or Soylent, as its inventor Rob Rhinehart has called it, apparently a "self deprecating" reference to 1970s film Soylent Green where a miracle food turns out to be made of human beings.

Are we entering a post-food society, or have some people just eaten too many nut bars? It seems the creator of this goo never ate food to start with - he consumed cheap fuel - $1 burritos, $5 pizzas and McDonalds. So maybe for him goo is barely a step down? Possibly even a step up.

Apparently there are covens of goo enthusiasts, gleefully concocting and glugging their own variations, mixed to suit their various intolerances and specific "tastes". What I don't get is that people who ostensibly don't want to spend time thinking about food are thinking about it an awful lot - well, it's not food - it's goo.
It seems incredibly... juvenile, this goo mixing; like kids. And the goo itself - like baby formula. Will we evolve to no longer need teeth? For the goo enthusiasts, food (real food) is no longer fuel, but a leisure activity - you only eat as a social thing. The inventor envisions drones dropping goo mix on starving communities - I can't help but hear the ghost of Marie Antoinette saying "Let them eat goo" while Rob Rhinehart declares he has the solution to world hunger.

Is this our post-food future? If we are what we eat, then we're on the path to becoming tasteless, colourless sludge. Without teeth.