This author is so offended by the idea of meal substitutes that they attempt to dress them up as class warfare. Such baseless, emotional absurdity
The richness of the human experience is found in variety. The moment we give that up we lose something. Experiencing food in all its many forms is one of the joys of life.
Similary, I love curated lists of songs and movies from other people the push me outside of the realm of what I seek out on my own. They have a richness that the infinite scrolling screens of AI generated suggestions are missing. Moveover, other people notice things about you and adjust their suggestions according to your emotional state. Down and depressed? Maybe a friend will suggest an insightful comedy to lift you up a bit. AI generated suggestions never seem to do that for me.
The aim of the person making the argument is to try and use someone else’s plight and disadvantages as a reason to excuse their choices.
They don’t do this by tugging on heart strings. They do this by trying to position themselves as a 3rd party neutral observer which makes the reader more likely to believe that their claim that a claimed injustice is real or a claimed solution will work.
It’s not an attempt to deceive through emotion. It’s an attempt to deceive by making themselves appear as neutral and unbiased.
I would be interested in an article making a case against these drinks that used some kind of substantial argument, but this is not it. The article may as well be an anti vaccine article claiming vaccines give you diarrhea, our bodies regulate themselves, and big pharma is trying to get you hooked on a recurring revenue model to create a class divide. A pseudo-intellectual argument worked backward from trying to explain the “feeling” that putting chemicals in your body is bad.
Reading between the lines, I suspect the real root of the argument is that the author has an emotion - they don’t like the idea of Soylent or the brand that was created behind it - and is jumping through hoops to rationalize that feeling.