Anti-Foodie Anderson Cooper Is Now on a Soylent Diet Because He’s So Busy

Anderson Cooper excels at many things but his palate is not one of them. The CNN host is a notoriously picky eater, which is why, after 51 years on this planet, he has finally given up on meals altogether. Cooper is now on a Soylent diet, much to the dismay of his late friend Anthony Bourdain.

Cooper, the anti-foodie, detailed his new approach to eating — or not eating at all — in a new interview. “I don’t care about food,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “So I’m trying to replace all food with this because it would be, like, three fewer decisions in a day.” Cooper, who is currently hooked on coffee-flavored Soylent, also acknowledged that Bourdain would be massively disappointed in his new liquid diet. “We had lunches together and he would just look at me like I was a creature from another planet,” he said. “Everything I thought about food was completely antithetical to his beliefs.”

Oddly enough this isn’t the first time Cooper has talked about Soylent and Anthony Bourdain’s hatred of it. Back in 2015, the pair did a joint interview with Vanity Fair, where they had a long entertaining dialogue about it, punctuated by Bourdain’s classic wit and humor.

“It’s absolutely everything I’m against,” Bourdain said after Cooper admitted he’d consider trying Soylent. “It’s evil in a bottle, or a bag, or whatever it comes in. It’s just anti-human, it’s anti-everything, and it’s filled with heavy metals, apparently! It’s just wrong.”

Even then Cooper hyped it up though as an efficient way to get meals in during his packed days. “I see it as saving time to give me pleasure in other realms,” he argued. “I’m wasting time eating when I could be receiving pleasure in other ways,” to which Bourdain replied, “You’re chipping away at my soul with every word.”

If Cooper wants to eat less food, though, why not celebrate that? After all, it leaves space at restaurants for other people who actually appreciate things other than oatmeal, salad and salmon sushi, which Cooper revealed to be his greatest hits. This is a man who didn’t try waffles until he was decades into life and then said of the experience, “What’s the point? It’s just a pancake with holes in it.” Cooper can have Soylent, and the rest of us humans who actually appreciate food can now freely indulge in the world’s reserve of waffles.