When you dwell on what Bay Area coders and software engineers typically eat during the day, there’s a weird dichotomy. Sure, Googlers have the option of choosing from among two dozen or more cafes that rotate out every couple of years. (Two visits to Mountain View ago, I had fantastic octopus at a Basque spot that only lasted another six months.) But for many others, it’s Coke Zero, Oreos, and Soylent while they stare at a screen for 18 hours straight.

Well, the New York Times went spelunking into the subterranean world of non-food foodstuffs, and it’s fair to say that the Gray Lady basically threw up into her napkin. Sam Sifton’s report on three meal replacements isn’t quite as bitchy as Pete Wells’ legendary takedown of Guy Fieri’s American Kitchen & Bar in Times Square, but it’s safe to say that “a liquid thickened with sweepings from the floor of a health food store” isn’t going to win hearts and minds, except maybe in the memory unit at The Villages.

“Some [protein shakes] elevate Ensure, the liquid nutritional supplement use in hospitals and to force-feed prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, to the status of fine wine,” Sifton writes.

He tried them all. Space Nutrients, Soylent, and Schmilk were “uniformly bland in favor” with that last one leaving a “blanket of oat flour over my tongue and a lasting taste of the worst glass of milk ever beneath it.” (The proper response to a burn of that magnitude is “Ouch!”, except that it sounds like the word might be hard to vocalize if you just ate-drank some Schmilk.)

This piece isn’t a stand-alone, either. The Times’ Technology section profiled some inveterate fans of meal replacements, the kind of San Francisco humanoids who say things like “[Schmoylent] just removes food completely from my morning equation up until about 7 p.m.” People who throw back a big, pancake-batter-like glass and regard it the way you or I might a load of bedding straight from the dryer.

We’d always regarded things like Schmilk as regrettable instances of tech’s most hardcore acolytes convincing themselves that everything their industry does is an improvement on actual human culture. (It’s only rational, right? Why linger over a dinner table with friends and family when you can optimize your way to full productivity with a chalky gray slurry instead?)

But it turns out that some people are actually hosting dinner parties where Soylent is a side dish, so irony lived to die another day after all. Further, the Times notes a sinister trend among the industry’s overlords who regard the act of eating itself as a time burglar.

Quoting Elon Musk’s statement that “If there was a way that I couldn’t eat so I could work more, I would not eat. I wish there was a way to get nutrients without sitting down for a meal,” the piece implies a future where the tech elite treat this universal human need with the same suspicion and hostility that a Bangladeshi underwear factory manager regards his underlings’ occasional need to urinate. Inasmuch as Soylent can ever be a tool of liberation, it could also be one of oppression, obviating the need for breaks with its perfectly balanced blend of everything you need to never get up from your desk again.

You can see the sweat beading on its proponents’ brows, too. Says one habitual user: “I am getting sick of the taste … I am thinking I’ll have to start flavoring it.”