The Soylent Banquet is a cooking demonstration and tasting event where common ingredients found in Meal Replacement Beverages (MRBs) are prepared and shared through slow and fantastic processes in a social setting.
The recipes in a Soylent Banquet build on the nutritional research of the Soylent community, but invert the logic of meal replacement, through a banquet that is slow, social and convivial.
The participatory meal starts with a guided taste test of meal replacement beverages. The final course of the banquet utilizes important ingredients from the Soylent formula, prepared in the slowest and most fantastic way possible.
In the process of acquiring, examining and cooking with the raw ingredients of Soylent, participants can debate the economic, ecological and culinary implications of this high modernist “food”.
MRBs require a smoothly functioning global supply chain, and highly mobile, fungible commodities which can be swapped out and moved around the planet quickly. MRBs break down these fungible food products into their components in order to rebuild them into a liquid or powder, based on nutritional requirements.
In the Soylent Banquet, we have paired this reductive process with the cooking techniques of molecular gastronomy. In molecular gastronomy, foods are also broken down into more basic chemical constituents, but instead of being made efficient, they are then are processed through labor intensive techniques to create novel tasting experiences that celebrate the act of eating, rather than side-railing it.
Soylent Banquet and Adversarial Food Design
Adversarial Food Design Workshop