Recently I finished my batch of four bags of Joylent (banana, strawberry, mango and chocolate). As it turns out, I haven’t died! Hooray! If anything I blog more often, which is probably not to blame on my nutricional choices.

Flavour experiences

Let’s start off with the fact that the taste has overall quite grown on me. Some people might dislike the strong taste of oatmeal but I enjoy it, it feels healthy. Before I have eaten cereal for breakfas every single day for roughly my entire school life (13 years, give or take), so I clearly don’t bore that easily.

The different flavours had some surprises:

• I did not like strawberry. By far the worst. It had strawberry seeds in it (Wikipedia tells me these are called achene, The More You Know) which gave the impression of not being artificially flavoured. I wouldn’t know about that; maybe I just prefer artificial strawberry aroma.
• Banana was to spite my expectations better than expected. It had a more muted banana taste which is far preferable to actual banana
• Chocolate was chocolate. I liked this one, because it tasted like chocolate but wasn’t as sweet and overpowering as actual chocolate and you could eat more of it without feeling bad. Now give me a white chocolate flavour and we have a deal.
• Mango. I don’t eat mango often, but this was by far the most interesting of the bunch. Had a nice fruity taste.

My Joylent order was a group order for three people, for completeness their impressions have been:

• One tried banana, liked it better than expected
• The other disappeared completely and haven’t heard from them since. Maybe in prison for walking around with bagloads of white powder. Or overdosed. Who knows.

Preparation

There were a number of reactions to my previous post on Soylent, saying that I should put it into a blender to dissolve it better. Unfortunately I don’t have one available, so while it might improve the taste, I’m not sure it’s worth for me at this point. Another idea was to put it in a fridge, which I did with the sole result that it separated into water and Joylent at the bottom. Also since it was chilled the taste was fainter. So that’s not really a solution for me either. On the other hand that’s fine because I can be lazy and make Soylent shakes just-in-time when I feel hungry and the exact amount I feel like.

Also realized that the less water I add the more I like it. I ended up most enjoying it in a viscous form comparable to lava. I can see how Uber Cookies make sense now, since eating Soylent in a solid form does sound appealing to me. Maybe next time I could try baking cookies myself (yes, I know this goes against my original plan to be lazy but I’d love to give this experiment a go some time).

Effects on the body

Usually I used less than the alotted ⅓ of a bag per meal, partly because I’m cheap, partly because I was eating normal lunch and partly because all this pulver in the shaker looked like a lot before adding water. That was alright, but I never felt particularly full afterwards, it was like a kind of snack, less like a meal. Since I don’t eat breakfast or dinner usually, that was alright with me, though at times I did want to eat a bit more.

My probably biggest fear for this experiment was that my digestive system would panic due to the liquid nature of the food, but no such thing happened. In fact nothing remarcable happened at all. I had no issues with teeth, since I wasn’t eating Soylent exclusively.

Next steps

So, after this great adventure (cough) what’s next in store? Frankly, I kinda miss the pulver, having this stuff available and ready to be made on a whim was nice. The taste was pretty good as well. Will I order more Joylent? Will I make my own Soylent according to some recipe?

Probably not yet. I will not order from Joylent any time soon, since my initial experience was rather mediocre (another cough). Maybe if they add some more interesting flavours. I will, though probably do another group order, this time from Queal, curiously another Soylent-producer from the Netherlands. They have some more flavours (though unfortunately, a good deal more expensive), so before I would attempt to make my own, I’d prefer to try out some different flavours and see what works for me and what doesn’t.

So, there might be some more episodes to go. Unless I die of food poisoning, that is :-)