What Soylent's proponents don't seem to understand is that food cannot be reduced to mere nutrition anymore than all of movement can be reduced to simple exercise, or sex and parenthood to mere reproduction (although in the latter case, the more strenuous socialists have tried!). Mealtime is a place of communion, conviviality, even sensuality. It is where we learn to be human.

Food production teaches us gratitude, because even with all the advances of chemistry and industrial agriculture, we did not invent photosynthesis, or the sun and the rain. We know, or ought to know, that living things were made to die for our sake. There is a satisfaction, difficult to articulate, in making one's own meal that cannot be found in the mere detritus of packaged meals. Yes, preparing food for others can be hard, annoying work. But as Gracy Olmstead points out in her fantastic defense of family mealtime, it is usually more than compensated in an enriched family life and affection. But in the autistic way that Marxists reduce so many human activities to the detested category of labor simpliciter, they also incinerate labors of love.

Michael Brendan Doughtery, "Soylent Food Is Here--And It Is Tyrannical"

There is something in the nature of cooking and eating together that forms a bond between people. It is no accident that the word "companion" is derived from Latin words meaning "with bread." A relaxed, convivial meal has a calming, even civilizing, effect, smoothing away the smash-and-grab haste of modern life.

Carl Honore, In Praise of Slowness, p. 71

Some thoughts from John Piper's A Hunger for God, pp. 13-15:

"The birthplace of Christian fasting is homesickness for God."

"My hunger for food was silenced by the hunger of my heart."

"Half of Christian fasting is that our physical appetite is lost because our homesickness for God is so intense. The other half is that our homesickness for God is threatened because our physical appetites are so intense. In the first half, appetite is lost. In the second half, appetite is resisted. In the first, we yield to the higher hunger that is. In the second, we fight for the higher hunger that isn't. Christian fasting is not only the spontaneous effect of a superior satisfaction in God; it is also a chosen weapon against every force in the world that would take that satisfaction away."

"The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie. It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite for heaven, but endless nibbling at the table of the world. It is not the X-rated video, but the prime time dribble of triviality we drink in every night."

"The greatest adversary of love to God is not his enemies but his gifts. And the most deadly appetites are not for the poison of evil, but for the simple pleasures of earth. For when these replace an appetite for God himself, the idolatry is scarcely recognizable, and almost incurable."

"What are food and agricultural and culinary traditions for, anyway? You can't answer that question properly without first asking, what are people for? Answer that one, and the first question answers itself."

Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons

The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared or fast food, confronts a platter covered with inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry.

Wendell Berry, "The Pleasures of Eating," from What Are People For?