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"Let\u2019s hear it for mankind: We\u2019ve been trying to replace food nearly as long as we\u2019ve been preparing it. &lt;a href=\"https://campaign.soylent.me/soylent-free-your-body\" target=\"_blank\"&gt;Soylent&lt;/a&gt;, a \u201Cpowdered food alternative\u201D currently grabbing headlines and investors, is the latest and most ambitious in a long line of edible things trying to be other edible things.\r\n\r\nFood substitutes are often accompanied by controversy. Over the last century, synthetic food has been touted as a solution to world hunger and an unethical aberration; it\u2019s augured utopia and dystopia. Mostly, though, it\u2019s provided an excuse for people to try absurd new things. We\u2019ve catalogued some of the more memorable creations for your enjoyment; accept no substitutes. Time was, if you didn\u2019t want to breastfeed your kids, you\u2019d just hire someone else to do it. This arrangement held together nicely for many centuries; then &lt;strong&gt;Elijah Pratt&lt;/strong&gt; invented the rubber nipple in 1845 and people got to thinking. By 1867, a German chemist named &lt;strong&gt;Justus von Liebig&lt;/strong&gt; had created what he called \u201CLiebig\u2019s Soluble Food for Babies,\u201D a powdered formula of potassium bicarbonate, wheat flour, and malt flour, intended to be mixed with warm cow\u2019s milk. An immediate hit, it gave rise to a slew of competitors, including Nestl\u00E9\u2019s Food, created by a certain fledgling company that now happens to the largest producer of packaged food in the world. Baby formula alone is a multibillion-dollar industry. Whale blubber was once used to make just about everything: it was found in detergents and dyes, in transmission fluids and aircraft engine lubricants, in candles and lamps. It was only a matter of time, then, until someone decided to cook with it. Early margarines, cooking oils, and butter substitutes relied on baleen whale oil as the primary raw material\u2014in 1916, fueled by the austerity of the first World War, British consumption of margarine surpassed butter for the first time, and whale-oil sales soared. Forget aspartame and sucralose: saccharin is the fake sugar that started it all. Say it\u2019s 1878 and you\u2019re a chemist working with the derivatives of coal tar\u2014fun, right? So fun that after a long day\u2019s work, you\u2019ll want to lick your hand. That\u2019s something like what &lt;strong&gt;Constantin Fahlberg&lt;/strong&gt; did when he discovered benzoic sulfimide at Johns Hopkins University. As names go, \u201Cbenzoic sulfimide\u201D doesn\u2019t exactly scream \u201Cartificial sweetener,\u201D so Fahlberg rechristened it saccharin, after the Latin for \u201Csweet\u201D; production began posthaste. Saccharin had a rocky start\u2014the USDA flirted with the idea of making sugar substitutes illegal\u2014but its popularity climbed thanks to a World War I sugar shortage. The diet crazes of the \u201860s and \u201870s helped sales, too, most notably of Sweet \u2018N Low, which remains the bestselling saccharin-based sweetener. &lt;strong&gt;C. W. Post&lt;/strong&gt;, of Post Cereal fame, invented this coffee substitute in 1895. Made from wheat bran, wheat, molasses, and the maltodextrin from corn, it\u2019s missing a pretty critical ingredient\u2014caffeine. But what strikes us as a major deterrent was actually a marketing point in the early 20th\u00A0century. Ads for Postum sometimes featured \u201CMr. Coffee Nerves,\u201D a demonic, ghostly archvillain who stood for all that is evil about caffeine: anxiety, irritability, the jitters. Postum sold briskly during World War II, when coffee was rationed and the deprived, uncaffeinated populace had no choice but to pursue alternative stimulation. Poor O'Doul's. Of the many nonalcoholic beers out there, it sits at the butt end of the most jokes, a token object of frat-boy malice; Urban Dictionary defines it as \"&lt;a href=\"http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=O'Doul's\" target=\"_blank\"&gt;the most pointless beverage in the world&lt;/a&gt;.\" Really, there's a low-alcohol culture dating back to medieval times, when people needed a drink that was cleaner than water (which was often contaminated) but didn't get you too buzzed to work. More recently, making nonalcoholic beer allowed American breweries to stay open during Prohibition, which began in 1920. Removing the alcohol from beer isn\u2019t too hard; alcohol has a lower boiling point than water, so if you heat the brew, it\u2019s the first thing to go. Be sure to trot out these factoids next time you encounter a sneering frat boy. (We hope it's not in this lifetime.) &lt;em&gt;(Photo: Jitze Couperus)&lt;/em&gt; Legend has it that NASA invented Tang, but legend is wrong. In fact, the food scientist &lt;strong&gt;William A. Mitchell&lt;/strong&gt; is responsible for this \u201Caromatic, orangy-tasting powder,\u201D as it was first marketed in 1959. Brimming with sugar, citric acid, artificial coloring, and a full day\u2019s serving of Vitamin C, Tang was intended as a hip alternative to orange juice\u2014an easy way to signify, at the breakfast table, that you were in step with the march of American progress. But only when &lt;strong&gt;John Glenn&lt;/strong&gt; drank it in space did Tang begin to fly off grocery shelves. &lt;em&gt;(Photo: Retroland U.S.A.)&lt;/em&gt; Problem one: Crab meat is expensive. Problem two: The modern, industrialized fish business has plenty of unused fish parts on its hands. If you can imagine one elegant, if suspicious, solution to this problem, you\u2019re probably thinking of surimi, a processed pur\u00E9e of gelatinous fish paste and additives (think salt, egg whites, MSG, starches, etc.) invented in the 1960s. Surimi, which means \u201Cground meat\u201D in Japanese, is used to imitate crab, lobster, and other expensive seafood; if you\u2019ve ever had a California roll from the sushi place on the corner, you\u2019ve almost certainly had surimi. Japan and the U.S. produce most of it; it\u2019s estimated that 2 to 3 percent of the world\u2019s annual fish catch is used in production. &lt;em&gt;(Photo: Natto/Wikimedia Commons)&lt;/em&gt; NASA did have a hand in these, as their rather clinical name suggests. &lt;strong&gt;Howard Bauman&lt;/strong&gt;, Pillsbury\u2019s \u201Cchief food technologist,\u201D developed them after having helped NASA prepare the first solid food cubes consumed by an astronaut. (That would be &lt;i&gt;Aurora 7&lt;/i&gt;\u2019s Scott Carpenter, in 1962; if you have cause to use this at a trivia night, please forward us a small percentage of your earnings.) Regular, non-astronaut people got to eat the sticks in 1970, when Pillsbury registered the trademark for what they called a \u201Cnon-frozen balance energy snack in rod form\u201D; think of them as a chewy, Tootsie Roll-esque, wholly innutritious precursor to energy bars. By the \u201880s, though, the space craze had died, and the snacks were discontinued. The FDA approved this controversial fat substitute in 1996. It\u2019s synthesized from sucrose, and because the enzymes in our bodies can\u2019t break it down for digestion, it\u2019s the only oil to claim that nutritional holy trinity: zero fat, zero cholesterol, and zero calories. It passes through your gastrointestinal tract like a ship in the night, but not, unfortunately, without side effects\u2014an infamous disclaimer on bags of chips warned of, uh, a need to use the nearest lavatory, apparently with good reason. In 2010,\u00A0&lt;i&gt;TIME&lt;/i&gt; ranked it the 38th\u00A0worst invention of all time. For what should be obvious reasons, Olestra has fallen out of fashion, but Wikipedia notes that it\u2019s found a second life \u201Cas a base for deck stains and a lubricant for small power tools.\u201D Yum! Back in 2008, the chefs &lt;strong&gt;Herv\u00E9 This&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Pierre Gagnaire&lt;/strong&gt;, who has three Michelin stars, made headlines by preparing the first gourmet dish composed entirely of chemical compounds; they called it \u201Cnote-by-note cuisine,\u201D a reference to its careful molecular construction, more the province of the laboratory than the kitchen. Served in Hong Kong, &lt;a href=\"http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/physics/synthetic-food-better-cooking-through-chemistry/ \"&gt;the dishes included jelly pearls made to taste like apple&lt;/a&gt;; a faux lemon sorbet; and a thin strip of \u201Cglucose caramel.\u201D Making the meal required ingredients like amylose and polyphenol, extracted from grapes by reverse osmosis. Good luck even beginning to try this at home. &lt;em&gt;(Photo: Jlastras/Wikimedia Commons)&lt;/em&gt; Food substitutes often bring out the philosophers in us: like, what &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; real, man? Ethicists are still debating lab-grown meat, which debuted earlier this year at a &lt;a href=\"http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/aug/05/first-hamburger-lab-grown-meat-press-conference\"&gt;much-publicized press conference&lt;/a&gt; where the world\u2019s first in-vitro burger was served. It was \u201Creal\u201D beef\u2014grown from stem cells extracted from a cow\u2014and its creator, &lt;b&gt;Dr. Mark Post &lt;/b&gt;of the Netherlands, hopes that it will free us from an inefficient dependency on livestock. But you want to know how it tastes: \u201Clike an animal-protein cake,\u201D &lt;a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/science/a-lab-grown-burger-gets-a-taste-test.html\"&gt;reports the New York Times&lt;/a&gt;. At last we come to Soylent, which really goes whole hog, so to speak: rather than replacing merely one part of your diet, this thick, milkshake-ish liquid becomes your diet. That\u2019s right: no more meals. Presently the toast of Silicon Valley, where it\u2019s raised more than a million in funds, Soylent is the creation of &lt;strong&gt;Rob Rhinehart&lt;/strong&gt;, a software engineer who believes that \u201Cfood is a hassle.\u201D (We\u2019re biting our tongues on this one.) Rhinehart and his cohort are keeping the final recipe (version 1.0) under lock until December, but \u201C&lt;a href=\"http://blog.soylent.me/post/53485019917/soylent-v-8-alpha-ingredients\"&gt;v.8 alpha&lt;/a&gt;\u201D contains maltodextrin, oat powder, rice protein, medium chain triglycerides, potassium gluconate, sodium, and more. The Soylent team promises that the final version will be adaptable to different genders and body types. &lt;em&gt;(Photo: Soylent.me)&lt;/em&gt;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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