These artists devised crazy recipes from raw Soylent ingredients

Soylent, the nutritious meal-replacement drink beloved by Silicon Valley, isdesigned for those on-the-go. It's not only an efficient way to fill up, it purportedly includes all thenutrients you might need.But there are also downsides. Drinking Soylent also eliminates the sensory aspects of eatingfood's texture, taste, and appearance are lost.The Center forGenomic Gastronomy, an artist-led food research institute, wantsto completely re-think the idea of the fast meal. So itcraftednew recipes inspired by Soylent."Meal Replacement Beverages take food to the absolute extreme of abstraction: there is almost no trace of the local landscape, provenance, process or ecological aspect of the food," Zach Denfield, the Center's co-founder, tells Tech Insider. "This is food as fuel."Denfield's team wanted to explore what is missing when you replace food with Soylent, like an ingredient's cultural ties and the act of gathering around a table.On March 18, theCenterthrewthe world's first Soylent Banquet, where itdeveloped and tried recipes using only raw Soylent ingredients.Some70 people attended the event at NRW-Forum, a contemporary art studio inDsseldorf, Germany.Soylent includes around 40ingredients, most with hard-to-pronounce names. At the banquet, there were six recipes that incorporated sixmain ingredients found in the drink: edible soy paper, apple-algae syrup, beet sugar, spicy rice pudding, mushroom oil powder, and caviar made from dehydrated vegetables.Here is the full menu:Therecipes are intricatecreations that took a lot of time and patience to make."The idea was to invert the idea of the 'fast meal,' or 'instant meal,'" Denfield says.Each recipe was"made with care and attention to detail."To craft the recipes, the chefs usedmolecular gastronomy,a modernist style of cuisinethat combines science and cooking. The idea was to create novel tasteexperiences that celebrate the act of eating, rather than abbreviating it, Denfield says.For example,for the beet-flavored sugar, the chefsheated the sugar and then spun it with a mixer while adding beet flakes.The event featured cooking demonstrations and tastings,which Denfield describes as "slow, social, and convivial." The guests helped make each recipe and then tasted them together, noting the different aromas and flavors.Throughout the evening, people eagerly took the time to learn about each recipe,sharingin the Soylent-infused tastings, Denfield says.Savoring a bright blue rice milk pudding cube, one guest grabbed another cube and placed it on a petri dish (his plate)."This is great," he said to Denfield. "Its like how people used to cook together in the olden days."Join the conversation about this storyNOW WATCH: EX-UNDERCOVER DEA AGENT: What I did when drug dealers asked me to try the product
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