New start-up aims to disrupt food industry (and bowels) with weird little food cubes
SquarEat is a meal delivery service that wants people to eat their food in the form of jiggly pucks
For too long, humanity has eaten food that tastes good and requires more than a minute to chew. We’ve wasted so much precious time that could’ve been spent being productive by buying recognizable ingredients, cooking meals that take up entire plates, and sitting down to dinner with friends.
The tyranny of that age, we’re happy to say, has passed. We’ve now entered the era of the food cube.
As described in an exceptional video that plays like dystopian satire, SquarEat would like you to start buying your food in the form of small squares that natural instinct would tell you to avoid putting anywhere near your mouth, but that the company promises will revolutionize eating.
Chief Marketing Officer Maria Laura Vacaflores asks us to imagine the possibilities of her company’s ability to “transform regular food … into squares,” holding some broccoli in one hand and a gelatinous beige chunk of what looks like chilled vomit in the other. We know which one we want!
In a Vice article about SquarEat, we learn that the whole thing works by having customers select the flavor (“from ‘Fisherman’ to ‘Sweet Break’ or ‘Treat’) and “meal size” they’d like before having the appropriate number of boxes delivered to their home. For reference, a “small” meal consists of four squares while a “regular” meal includes six of what a SquarEat pitch deck appetizingly describes as “standardized squared modular food.” That same deck “also says the company can use an algorithm to tell customers what they should eat,” which is nice, we guess, for when you just can’t make up your mind whether you’re in the mood for Brown or Off-White.
The rest of the advertisement shows us employees preparing their dread squares, people happily munching away on nutrient bricks together, and a buff man, muscles powered by delicious cubes, preparing to deliver boxes of the terrible squares to their destination.
Many people, from the makers of Soylent to the creators of the ill-fated Dilberito, have tried to defeat nature in the pursuit of a more efficient way to eat. None of them have cracked the code but none of them served their nasty innovations in the form of little squares either, so we’ll just have to wait and see if that bold idea allows SquarEat to finally, at long last convert humanity into bipedal livestock nibbling at our outsized mineral licks.
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