Food tech is just men rebranding what women have done for decades

From Soylent to a $700 juice box, men are being praised for releasing us from the prison of food. So why was it low-brow when women did that with SlimFast?

I tried explaining Soylent, the protein shake meal replacement popular in Silicon Valley, to my mom and she tilted her head: "Oh, you mean SlimFast?" she said.

I balked. No, Soylent is definitely tech, I explained, and it's on my beat. It has a minimalist label and comes in iterative versions like software (we're at Soylent 2.0). It has a young white male founder who philosophizes about it and connects it to broader themes of life efficiency and has raised $20m in venture capital funding on its promise of releasing us from the prison of food.