The History of Meal Replacement Drinks
The History of Meal Replacement Drinks
From sci-fi dreams to everyday convenience, meal replacement drinks have come a long way in 75 years.
"I don't miss the rotary telephone, and I don't miss food." -Soylent Founder Rob Rhinehart
Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash
The history of the adult meal replacement drink has two primary origins. As liquid nutrition for a specific population, meal replacement beverages were devised for a noble and practical reason: to nourish medical patients who couldn't chew, swallow, or digest solid food. As a more abstract concept for the general population, meal replacements were born in the imagination of science fiction writers beginning in the late 1800s. They envisioned a galaxy of pills, feeding tubes, and other synthetic innovations usurping food altogether for all of society.
Somehow, these two tales have become intertwined in the present age, where space-age tech innovations are poised to eclipse the hospital-borne drinks of yesteryear. Meal replacements were once mainly a consolation for convalescents, but now they're making wildly ambitious claims to be more easily digested, more optimally nutritious, and generally better than food - for everyone.
From Hospital Fluid to Household Fad
In the 1940s and 1950s, advances in health science emphasized the importance of nutrition as an adjunct to medical treatment and recovery. Researchers, doctors, and nursing staff began experimenting with liquid formulas that could deliver essential nutrients to patients who struggled to eat solids due to post-surgical recovery, gastrointestinal issues, or severe illness.
By the 1960s and 1970s, meal replacement drinks became more refined and widely used in hospital settings, where they played a crucial role in preventing malnutrition. Tailored recipes were developed for specific needs, including high-calorie versions for those with wasting diseases, like cancer, and protein-rich options for post-operative muscle repair.
They also became a lifeline for patients undergoing chemotherapy or suffering from conditions like dysphagia (difficulty swallowing), providing a convenient and effective avenue for nutrient intake without food. From there, exporting meal replacement beyond clinical use to the mass market didn't take much imagination.
This happened in 1959 with Metrecal, the "monotonous, pastel goop" that promised automatic, effortless weight loss by replacing the chief cause of unwanted weight gain: eating. The product was released by Mead Johnson & Company, which has already had experience producing medical meal replacement Sustagen since 1946. The migration from dietetics to dieting was, therefore, more of a pivot in marketing than nutrition.
Since weight loss was the primary health (or cosmetic) priority of the day, this was the obvious way to expand the consumer base for existing meal replacement technology, and it was a huge, multi-million-dollar success. By 1963, the cultural sensation spawned hundreds of competitors, and in 1977, one emerged that would come to reign supreme: the still-iconic SlimFast.
Metrecal bit the dust, but many relics of the early days of consumer-level meal replacements, albeit with some modifications, are still widely available today. Medically oriented products like Ensure (1973) and Boost (1988) can be purchased as easily as weight loss formulas like SlimFast and Atkins' Advantage Shakes (1997). However, these historical leftovers are facing a new wave of competition from a brave new world of food-replacing goo with its own history.
The Post-Food of Yesterday's Tomorrow
The hospital-to-household pipeline was one arc of meal replacement history, but it is now bisected by another, very different line of thinking. Going back further in time, this other conceptual arc of replacing food, whether as liquid, pills, or edible blocks, has its roots in early science fiction. Fantastic conceptions of outlandish tales in epochs to come could hardly leave something so fundamental untouched, and one safe assumption was that, whatever it looked like in the year 3,000, nourishment would look different than it does today.
Sci-fi novellas of the late 19th and early 20th centuries frequently depicted weird food futures, and since movies and TV shows have existed, no decade has been without some version of the forecast. In Terry Gilliam's classic Brazil (1985), strange pastel pastes are served in front of pictures of the traditional foods they taste like. In Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994), real food is instantly synthesized in a 'replicator.' In other visions, food is replaced altogether: George of The Jetsons (1962) gulps down a pill that keeps him full all day.
On-screen meal replacement projections are too relevant to be dismissed because they hold up a mirror to cultural opinions on the issue, showing us what we hope for and fear about the futuristic world of food substitution. In this regard, they cover a full range from the utopian (Star Trek) and humourous (The Jetsons, Brazil) to the bleakly dystopian: the iconic 1973 scene of Charlton Heston screaming that "Soylent Green is people" continues to abide in popular consciousness generations later.
More recently, Bong Joon-Ho's critically acclaimed Snowpiercer (2013) featured a dramatic revelation that the grim protein tablets eaten by the masses were, in fact, processed insects all along. Blade Runner 2049 (2017) gives us a similar glimpse of 'protein farms' where bladders of green liquid are harvested from grubs and other bugs.
The Future is Now
In a sense, we are already living a less dramatic version of a sci-fi dystopia: synthetic vitamins derived from petroleum are combined with subsidized, genetically modified crops from soy, corn, and canola to make the vast majority of ingredients in most major meal replacement drinks on the market. Depending on your perspective, it's something of a tragic irony that clinical nutrition solutions for society's most vulnerable populations, secured by corporate contracts with public healthcare institutions, are primarily composed of fully synthetic chemicals like aspartame and natural derivatives like maltodextrin and carrageenan that bear little resemblance to their source material.
On the other hand, the notion of humans transcending their dependence on one of the primary requirements of the body with something even better than food maintains a distinctly utopian allure, too - and this allure is made stronger than ever by a new generation of healthy meal replacement drinks that appeal to people with no trouble eating and no immediate fear of malnutrition. Bold, hypermodern promises of clean ingredients, sustainability, whole foods, and peak nutrition for peak living adorn beautifully designed labels on expertly marketed super-drinks.
"Optimal" and "efficiency" are not words that would have appeared in 1960s meal replacement marketing, nor the implication that replacing food with a superior alternative can help a software engineer crack the code of their lifestyle. But intellectual productivity, precise time management, and a thriving human body have all become conceptually conjoined by products with telling names like Soylent (2013) and Huel (2015- short for 'human fuel') in a way that has more in common with science fiction speculation than feeding tube formulas or weight loss shakes.
Different Products, Different People, Different Planet
On the nutrition side of the equation, all meal replacements see nutritionism - the cold notion that food is nothing meaningful apart from vitamins, minerals, proteins, fats, and carbohydrates - taken to its logical endpoint: the food is gone, and only the nutrients remain. But in the past 15 years, we also see the body reconfigured as a kind of computer: for optimal operating system outputs, we need optimal inputs.
The messaging is clear that food, as our grandparents knew it, is becoming obsolete, and it's time to switch to the upgrade. These products don't come from nutritionists or dieticians (let alone from chefs or family heirloom recipes) but from engineers, tech entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists who explicitly claim to have "hacked" food. This language may seem strange, but it's clearly striking a chord, and especially with young people, these drinks are exploding in popularity.
Many of us work too much or are just too tired to cook, but that familiar squeeze is only part of the story. A necessary underbelly of this new hi-tech meal replacement wave is that, on a large scale, we are losing faith in edible fare. The food industry across the board, from plants to land animals to seafood to packaged foods, has been imbued with a new suspicion that didn't exist when the chalky weight-loss wonder Metrecal hit the scene in 1959.
Whether it's pesticides, hormones, heavy metals, or ultra-processed ingredients, we have built a decidedly 21st-century distrust of food that would have been quite unintelligible to 1960s America but makes post-apocalyptic stories like Vesper (2022) hit distressingly close to home. As our modern fear of modern food systems grows, combined with dwindling free time and increased economic pressure, the question "Why not just skip it all and drink the goo?" seems less insane by the day.
Plus ça Change, Plus C'est la Même Chose
In a way, not much has changed about mass-market meal replacement drinks since the inception of Metrecal: we are trying to replace food with something just as good (or better) but infinitely more convenient and more suited to helping us become the versions of ourselves we want to be. Nothing, that is, except the shifting cultural priorities that underpin our motivation to replace food in the first place.
Early hospital mainstays Ensure, Boost, and even the 1950s Sustagen are still on the market, as are increasingly antiquated weight-loss products like SlimFast. Meanwhile, Huel, Soylent, yfood and Ample are using social media influencers to preach a new gospel of 'meal replacement 2.0.' They have different backstories, speak to other demographics, and draw their inspiration from different places.
And while Silicon Valley won't replace Nestle in medical settings any time soon, they are making too much of a splash with millennials to be ignored. One thing early futurist visions of meals-in-a-pill or astronaut liquids may have failed to imagine is a world where a variety of meal replacements existed side-by-side with actual food as options on shelves of the same supermarket.
In this day and age, the choice is ours from day to day and meal to meal: is healthy nutrition something that comes from a medical manufacturer, a tech startup, or a farmer's soil?
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