It started being used because after Rhinehart’s February 2013 blog was read, many people decided they didn’t want to wait for Rosa Labs to release the product. So an active community of DIYers started making their own. Since “Soylent” was the only product at that point (and even it wasn’t released yet), they wanted “Do it yourself soylent.” That’s the only thing they knew to call it at that point. I suppose they could have called it “DIY Rob Rhinehart inspired instant powdered future total manufactured designer food.” But DIY soylent is what they started calling it. Some guy named Nick (not associated with Rhinehart or Soylent) started https://diy.soylent.com.
Agreed, there are a lot more generic and accurate names. But if the 13 commenters in this thread can’t agree on what that name should be, good luck with the thousands of worldwide instant powdered future total manufactured designer food users.
Personally soylent just makes me go in my head “It’s people!”
And gives me an odd hankering for 1970’s movies… But then again I am new to the whole powdery food thing.
As for a name, I’m finance IT, we go gaga for acronyms! CPD’s? Complete Powdered Food?
GOOP? Great Oh Oops Powder (ok so that doesn’t work so much, but I like goop as a word)
They are not all liquid though, we have meal square and also twennybar. In many ways trying to describe these foods is going to run into the same problems as trying to describe a chair does. Philosophically, they are both ‘non natural kinds’.
Simple is more likely to work. *lent is both short and mostly unambiguous.
I used to use the DIY Soylent site a couple of years ago when I was trying to make my own version. It took me a while to realise that it wasn’t actually from the same people who created Soylent.
But when I used to poke around in the Soylent forum and subreddit, it did seem strange to me if I ever saw someone use the word “soylent” to refer to meal drinks in the broader sense. I can see why it happened, though, because Soylent was the first major product of this modern wave of nutritionally complete powdered foods.
It is definitely confusing, though. Just reading through this thread, seeing people having to keep referring to Soylent or soylent with upper or lowercase just shows how daft the whole situation is. Great for the Soylent brand, but awfully confusing for the rest of us.
Surely only somebody who works for Soylent would argue that using soylent as the generic term is a good idea?
These days, I just say “meal drink”. Simple. Two words, says exactly what it is. It’s a meal, and it’s a drink. It’s a meal drink.
