"According to Arthur Whitmore, a press officer with the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, Soylent would fall into the category of what the FDA considers food. Unlike a medication, Soylent will not require FDA approval, unless it contains some new type of food additive, which Rhinehart would need to disclose.
It’s important to Rhinehart that Soylent be considered a food, as opposed to a medicine or supplement, so that food-stamp recipients can buy it using EBT cards."
One month of Soylent is currently $255; the maximum SNAP benefit for a single person is $189. If he makes his $5/day target, maybe, but the SNAP benefit for the Nth person in an N person household decreases to $142.
Within the Soylent community, there are two acknowledged classes of soylent. The two are distinguished by using "Soylent" when referring to the "official" recipe, and "soylent" when referring to DIY versions.
Rob has stated several times that he isn't going to patent the Soylent recipe. The reason is because the only product on the market that comes even close to Soylent for complete nutrition (without lots of harmful other components) is Plumpy'nut [1]. Plumpy'nut's recipe is patented, so even if someone could produce it cheaper, they can't legally produce it.
Rob is keeping the Soylent formula open in large part so that other people can produce exact and comparable versions. In addition, Rob has not only allowed others to develop comparable version, but outright encouraged it. So much so that when NickP developed a tool to develop recipes based on a list of ingredients and individual goals, Rob promoted the tool and gave it a home on the official soylent.me domain - http://diy.soylent.me/
tl;dr - Your concern has been already been acknowledged by the community; there are alternative recipes, including one that works out to $74.73 a month, which is well under the $225 SNAP allowance.
"According to Arthur Whitmore, a press officer with the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, Soylent would fall into the category of what the FDA considers food. Unlike a medication, Soylent will not require FDA approval, unless it contains some new type of food additive, which Rhinehart would need to disclose.
It’s important to Rhinehart that Soylent be considered a food, as opposed to a medicine or supplement, so that food-stamp recipients can buy it using EBT cards."
http://www.healthline.com/health-news/tech-is-powdered-soyle... http://discourse.soylent.me/t/fda-press-officer-comment/3783