I enjoy reading the Washington Post, but one thing I've noticed post-Bezos is how trite the articles in the section "The Post Recommends" are. They really are linkbaity, even if they link to articles on the Post. I mean, I can be reading The DC Sports Bog [sic] incognito, and the Post will recommend, "The sobering thing doctors do when they die."

But I guess it's working. Today, I finally gave in and read an article that's often “recommended”, "The baffling reason many millennials don’t eat cereal". I’d already read The New York Times’ version, so might asd well see what the Post has to add. Basically, the answer appears to be that millennials don't want to clean the bowl.

But there is another thing happening, which should scare cereal makers — and, really, anyone who has a stake in this country's future — more: A large contingent of millennials are uninterested in breakfast cereal because eating it means using a bowl, and bowls don't clean themselves (or get tossed in the garbage). Bowls, kids these days groan, have to be cleaned.

Wow. I mean, I often eat cereal because all I have to clean is the bowl! It's not that difficult. It’s just milk. Rinse, wipe well, and leave it out for tomorrow morning.

Sad enough, right? But the real take home is the last sentence of the piece:

Maybe Soylent is the future after all.

And I was pretty sure I knew what Soyent is... Seems like I’d read an article on how popular the soy shake had become in place of meals in Silicon Valley. From today’s Wikipedia, it looks like I’m remembering correctly:

Soylent is a meal replacement beverage, advertised as a "staple meal", available in both liquid and powdered forms. Its creators state that Soylent meets all nutritional requirements for an average adult, but some critics claim otherwise. It was first created and tested by software engineer Rob Rhinehart as a self-experiment in nutrition. Subsequently, the powdered version of Soylent was developed into the first product line of the company Rosa Labs, who currently markets and sells the formulation.

What a weird product. You couldn’t engineer a better hipster food, which tells me that’s essentially what it is. I mean, look at these "use" images.

It’s essentially the equivalent of six slices of bread worth of calories. I can’t tell how many they expect you to drink to equal a meal, but I’m guessing one at $2.69. I guess that’s pretty cheap, compared to going out for lunch, but compared to a loaf of sandwich bread, well, even this bottle of calories isn’t insanely cheap. And there’s some waste, no matter what they’d like you to believe. It’s pretty ‘Murican, if you ask me. Folks pay a small premium for convenience and hipsterness, and somebody profits.

But that’s not ‘Murican enough. Take another look at this image, from Soyent’s site (oh, even more hipster. It’s hosted on heroku via fastly! Well done, Soyent):

Really? Mr. Skinny New Hat, Hipster Sunglasses, Hipster Facial Hair is dribbling Soyent all over his chin. Is he drinking anything? Not only do we not have time to eat, we have so freakin' much disposable income we can't possibly drink our meals respectfully. We have so little time to waste, unless it's time taken to be wasteful.

'Murica. Come on Soyent. Be classy.

Labels: Other Stuff, wapo