It's not only a question of time,it's also a question of energy and focus.

Soylent is not for everyone, but imagine you are a college grad, who just got a good job that finally pays and you want to make sure you build a good career.

Many college grads also need to focus on friends, dating, finally trying to find good exercise to become healthy, everything while working 60+h a week.

Not everyone has their stuff figured out, many young professionals are struggling, due to little money, social anxiety, job troubles and many of them can't cook.

Now tell them they should cook something every couple of days and that they should learn cooling for that when they can't even get their problems straight by themselves right now.

Soylent is not for everyone, but it is a big help for young college grads who are barely scraping by and who don't know how to cook. It's better than McDonalds.

It does require forethought, planning, a knowledge of how to cook food, and the ability to source and store ingredients, however. All of which sounds like too much of a hassle for me, to be perfectly honest. Rob Rhinehart, the creator of Soylent, doesn't even own a refrigerator (not that I'm suggesting people should be more like Rob...). While you may find it sad that others don't have the time or patience to cook, for a lot of people it's just one of those things they'd rather not have to deal with -- and for those people, Soylent isn't an alternative to cooking real healthy food, but rather to buying a burger at McDonalds.

Why do you see it as people having to "justify" Soylent? It's just a sales pitch, like any other sales pitch. And it happens to be the way a lot of people feel. I used to make meals on very little money with very little time, and I liked Soylent better. Yeah I could do it, but I can use even less time and fewer ingredients and end up with something that I'm just really in the mood for sometimes. No one's making you buy it. THAT would need justification. This is something somebody sells.