Your concerns seem valid, I am just curious to know if you would apply this level of scrutiny to other foods. Many foods are made with "a large and diverse amount of minerals / proteins etcetera." Soylent contains eight or ten food ingredients plus about 24 vitamin and mineral additives. Pop-Tarts contain about thirty ingredients plus about eight vitamins and mineral additives. Probably you don't consider Pop-Tarts health food, but do you "trust" them? Pop-Tarts have been around for a while, and we should perhaps feel more comfortable with foods that don't have a "startup image" (though the "organic" movement does just the reverse, making us doubt the safety of the fruits and vegetables our parents ate). I think it's the idea that this stuff comes out of a laboratory, and doesn't have the familiar look of food, that makes us suspicious. But these days probably a lot of food comes from places just as sterile as a laboratory. The additional scrutiny a novel product like Soylent gets might work in favor of its safety. And our intuitions can work against us: the wholesome image of a grilled hamburger at a family picnic conceals significant risk of bacterial and carcinogenic pathogens.
Good points. The lab-grown aspect definitely colors my image of Soylent negatively. While I don't really mind whether my food comes from a lab or not, I do think food is inherently 'better' when it's created by combining and altering regular food (for Pop-Tarts, it's wheat / corn) versus starting from mostly boxes of powder. Whether it's actually safer, I don't know, but the perceived safety of a Pop-Tart is definitely higher. For me, it's also the diversity aspect: Soylent tries to include as much good and nutritional ingredients as possible, whereas most food does not (or not to such a degree as a Pop-Tart). The diverse combination of ingredients that Soylent has is likely not as understood as a combination of wheats, corns, vitamins, colorings, preservatives etcetera that most of my food consists of. To put it bluntly, it's a bit scary because it's new. I wouldn't want to test a new type of parachute for the same reason. Give me the tried and tested when my health is at stake.