Some people would rather trade the highs/lows of grocery shopping and cooking for simple, healthy meals, but mostly bland meals. I don't think Soylent is the answer for everyone, it's a niche the same way Whole Foods is a niche. But they do have a real value prop that is easily overlooked if you only look at the food part of it, instead of all of the other processes around it.
Food is life. If you've replaced food with some manufactured shake, it just seems fundamentally wrong. Meals aren't obligations, they are when people get together. They're a time to reflect and experience life. WTF are you doing that eating dinner is too much of a burden?
I can see using something like Soylent as a backup for fueling up while traveling or leaving it at your desk or in the car for a pinch situation. Full on food replacement conjures up images of lonely, single people giving up on life.
Your “lonely people giving up on life” is a huge reach. It’s just food. People are capable of socializing outside of meals.
Setting that aside for a moment, though, you also don’t have to replace every meal, as is mentioned elsewhere in the comments. How about just breakfast? Despite it being greatly beneficial to start the day with food, many people feel like they don’t have the time. Something quick, filling, and taking no preparation is ideal.
"Powerfood" additives, being basically an orthogonal component -- aside, it's basically a powdered (or perhaps pasteurized concentrate, a la Minute Made) remake of the classic, fresh-everything version of your regular breakfast smoothie.
You don't see any issues with that?
The hackles come up when it's promoted or discussed as a broader meal replacement.
Which just so happens to be Soylent's business plan.
But yes. Their broader business plan and certainly what gets the press seems to be Soylent as broader meal replacement. If this were just another "nutritional drink on the go" absolutely no one would care.
Right -- as with the entire junk food industry in general, basically.
As in: yes, there's certainly a big "value prop" in getting you past that next perceived craving (or legitimate nutritional need), as expediently as possible. But whether that provides a good "value" in the long run (either nutritionally or financially) is highly questionable.
But whether any of these actually are viable "replacements" (considering long-term health and other side effects) is again very much open to question.
Less sarcastically -- I've come to find that learning how to not just cope with, but enjoy the food acquisition process, end-to-end -- from procurement, to cooking and prep, and yes, even washing dishes and maintaining a decent kitchen; but most of all, preparing delicious meals for friends, now and then (and all of this, on a shoestring budget, if necessary) -- to be one of the most valuable life skills one can acquire.
So if you're currently finding it "frustrating" -- that's a good thing, because it means that your body is correctly signaling you to the fact that there's not just an opportunity to learn, but to make great efficiency gains but just a modest investment in just... figuring out how food works.
Taking milk as an example -- you're absolutely right that the chains are wrongly optimized in a lot of their offerings; the quart- (or gallon-!) sized milk offerings being a great example. At the end of the day, "milk", as such, is just not a great item to have in one's list of staples -- yogurt and kefir provide very much the same nutritive value (and overall "milk-experience", in my view) with much better shelf life, and much better value per unit cost, overall. Or if you must have "milk", as such, just a small bottle of raw (or appropriately pasteurized) milk from a high quality dairy (this is crucial), which you'll find you'll need to drink only about 1/3 the amount of compared to the usual chain-offered "big dairy" milk, will do just fine.
But the thing about Soylent -- the really "real sickness" about it, in my view -- is that rather than address this frustration by getting to its root cause (lack of awareness of how food works, on a basic level; and how awesome things can be when you get your food supply right, or at least working for you, rather than against you) -- it simply masks it. And on top of that, rather insidiously promotes dependence (on a brand) -- rather than independence and self-sufficiency -- as a way of addressing the problem.