MARKÉTA DOLEJŠOVÁ
  • Soylent


As part of my PhD research on food-tech design, I conducted an ethnographic study of 'diet hackers' experimenting with powdered-based food replacements, at that time commonly referred to as soylent.

My focus throughout the study was on soylent experimentation as a form of amateur citizen science in the field of health and nutrition. I was interested in both personal and socio-economic contexts of soylent diet hacking.

Fascinated by the crude pragmatism and asceticism of soylent as an extemely ascetic and simplistic data-driven powder solution to everyday food problems, my aim was to understand the motivations, aspirations, and experiences of soylent diet practitioners. 

Between December 2014 and March 2017, I completed interviews with 65 soylent dieters; a qualitative content analysis of three online soylent user forums; three experimental hands-on workshops focused on DIY making of soylent powders; and two auto-ethnographic self-experiments where I probed the opportunities and limitations of the diet on myself. 

I was interested in how soylent practitioners grow and validate their food & nutrition science expertise, how they handle the health safety and data security risks of their unusual online-offline dietary practice, and how they negotiate between the data-driven accuracy and gastronomic pleasure of food consumption.

Role:
Researcher, practitioner.
Years:
2014-2017

    Events:
    2015 – Make your own BioSoylent. Workshop at Squat&Grow, Singapore.

     Talks:
    2017 - Edible Speculations: Unpacking the Paradoxes of Digital Food Cultures (Digital Food Cultures symposium) 
    2017 - The Story of Quantified Lunch: from Hacker’s Diet to Soylent Powdered Foods. 
    2016 - Advancing Citizen Science Approach To Health Self-Experimentation: What I Learned From the Soylent Diet Geeks.
    2015 - Living on Big Data: Open Source Diet and DIY Nutritionism of soylent Consumers. 

    Publications:Dolejšová, M. (2020). From Silicon Valley to Table: Solving Food Problems by Making Food Disappear. In Digital Food Cultures, edited by Zeena Feldman & Deborah Lupton. Routledge.

    Dolejšová, M., & Kera, D. (2017). Soylent Diet Self-Experimentation: Design Challenges in Extreme Citizen Science Projects. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW ‘17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2112-2123. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998365

    Dolejšová, M., Kera, D., Storni, C., Khot, R.A., Clement, I.J., Kishor, P. & Pavelka, I. (2017). Digital Health and Self-experimentation:Design Challenges & Provocations. In Extended Abstracts of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ‘17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 510-517. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3027063.3027071 

    Dolejšová, M. (2016). Deciphering a Meal through Open Source Standards: Soylent and the Rise of Diet Hackers. In Extended Abstracts of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ‘16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 436-448. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/2851581.2892586 

    Dolejšová, M. (2016, August 2nd). Experimentální Prášková Strava Soylent: Nutriční Bastlíři a Politika Strachu z Jídla. (Soylent Diet: Nutrition Hackers and the Politics of Food Anxieties). Vesmír Magazine, vol. 2, issue 8, 2016. [http://bit.ly/2LfqhdD] — written in Czech

    Dolejšová, M. (2015, January 31st). Soylent: Instantní Emoce z Prášku. (Soylent: Instant Powdered Emotions) Technet iDnes. [http://bit.ly/2Xzw4ws] — written in Czech