I would be more surprised if, by only eating when you're socially required to, you happened to get the exact essential nutrients the diet would otherwise leave you without.
here's what i was thinking:
"real food" has plenty of vitamins and stuff
some of that stuff might have a long half-life in the body
and be needed only in small (catalytic?) amounts.
so that
you wouldn't know about them if you just studied basic nutrition textbooks (or perhaps nobody knows about them)
if your social eating is frequent enough, you'd never lack them.
so, ideally, people following some soylent-type practice strictly will develop some interesting symptoms, and we'll discover some new stuff. but if they cheat, we don't learn a...
Thus spake Eliezer:
It seems that many here might have outlandish ideas for ways of improving our lives. For instance, a recent post advocated installing really bright lights as a way to boost alertness and productivity. We should not adopt such hacks into our dogma until we're pretty sure they work; however, one way of knowing whether a crazy idea works is to try implementing it, and you may have more ideas than you're planning to implement.
So: please post all such lifehack ideas! Even if you haven't tried them, even if they seem unlikely to work. Post them separately, unless some other way would be more appropriate. If you've tried some idea and it hasn't worked, it would be useful to post that too.