Diving into Soylent: Part I

Background

I first read about Soylent a month into my treck on the Appalachian Trail. I was hiking fourteen hours a day, eating 4000-6000 calories a day, minimizing travel weight, and trying hard not break the bank. If there was ever a time to appreciate pure nutrtional utility optimized for cost then that was it.

Soylent is food simplified. After quite a bit research, the Soylent team arrived at this reverse engineered food recipe. Everything your body needs in its most basic form.

Optimizing meals for cost and utility was something I had already begun to do over the years but with nowhere near the precision and certainly not to the extent Soylent has. As the falls semester ramps up I decided to give it a go.

Goals

I lost a lot of weight over the five months on the trail as well as pretty much all functional upper body strength. To counter that I would like to create a varient with a high calorie count, a lot of protein, and that meets the standard strength training micro/macro nutrient profile.

Recipe

Soylent is open source. They have released the recipe online and even host a DIY community site for others to share their own tweaked recipes, comment on other recipes, and discover new ingredients.

After looking through existing recipes, reading reviews, and comparing prices I arrived at Zete Chow. The main components for calories and protein are also the primary ingredients for protein and mass gainer supplements - worst case I hate the meal replacement, salvage the whey concentrate and maltodextrin, and manufacture my own workout shakes.

Purchase

I sourced as many of the ingredients as I could from Amazon. While I might have been able to track them down for less, the convenience of Amazon Prime free shipping offset the potential cost difference.

Amazon didn't have everything though. The fifty pound each I bought of maltodextrin and whey protein concentrate came from a bakery supply source. A few things I decided to source locally as well.

Everything is in the mail so all that's left for now is to wait. Part II will cover mixing and storage.