> Rob Rhinehart, to compress all the nutrition the human body needs to live into one single, easily digestible formula, like the twenty-first-century version of manna. But that is fundamentally the opposite of the way we increasingly want to eat in America and in much of the developed world.
Uh, speak for yourself.
I order Soylent from time-to-time. It's a nice way to simplify about 75% of my meal prep, while remaining healthy and helping me avoid constant snacking. If I was on my own I'd consider 100% Soylent.
You don't need three gourmet meals a day. Food is a convenient social activity, but it's not the only one.
So many issues with this article, but this one...
> the persistent effect that progress in food processing has had on our taste buds, as we amp up artificial flavors in an attempt regain the natural flavor we have stripped from our food with technology
If you'd ever had Soylent, you'd realize that it's entirely the opposite of an "amped-up, artificial flavour". It's not bland - it has a light flavour that isn't offensive no matter how much you drink.
To take it a step further: Is it immoral to eat whole foods for all 3 meals a day?
Research has shown we get most of the nutrients we need from our first meal (of whole foods) each day. We only need calories from that point on. Shouldn't we then just try to get the most efficient form of calories, so long as those calories don't do harm? Leave the other 2 nutrient-rich meals for the rest of the world.
He frames it as "this is not what Americans want." But just because we can increasingly eat 3 nutrient-rich meals doesn't mean we should. In fact, it means the opposite -- that we should give those meals away because we can.
But starvation and malnutrition are generally not caused by lack of production, right? I think distribution and economic issues are usually at fault. So eating less doesn't help anyone, except maybe yourself.
"We do not view processed foods as inherently bad or unhealthy. We believe that the nutritional value of a foodstuff - regardless of whether it is prepared in a factory, a restaurant, or at a backyard barbecue - is a direct consequence of the variety of nutrients that it provides and their context within one's overall diet."
I agree that page is not a thorough proof of their case. It seems to be intended to just outline, at a high level, their point of view.
You are saying you disagree that the constituent components of an egg are the source of its nutritional value?
Do you suggest that something inside a chicken imbues in the egg ephemeral nutritional properties that our digestive system cannot extract from an equally proportioned mix of fat/cholesterol/protein/etc that was produced in a man-made factory rather than a hen?
Due to lack of training and education, I don't claim to have any knowledge of nutritional science.
The makers of Soylent, on the other hand, are pretty good at making broad sweeping nutritional claims without bothering to back them up with legitimate science.
But I know we absorb things differently depending on what we found them in.
We absorb protein differently if they come from mat or from vegetables. We absorb calcium differently if it comes from milk or from a pill.
So in that case, I think think that assuming the nutritional value of some food comes only from its composition is a claim that needs serious backing.
Well, I mean why would the Soylent FAQ say anything otherwise? Nutritionists disagree. It's not some hippie new age anti-industry opinion, it's a fact.
In fact, this is such a stupid oversimplification that any amount of critical thinking can debunk it. There is a lot more to food that the net nutrition intake you have at the end of the day. The actual, physical composition of the food determines how quickly you body digests it, which in turn affects your energy levels, appetite, and mood. Your body does not digest apple juice the same way as it does raw apples, even if both have the same exact ingredients. You won't feel the same after a smoothie as you will after the same ingredients delivered raw. One method of intake gives you a short, high burst of energy followed by steeper drop off, while the raw form provides gentler changes and is less likely to spike your blood sugar.
All of this interacts with your psychology, your metabolism, and your physical and mental energy.
This is like saying I can safely fast for 4 days once If I eat 6000 calories worth of [insert food/drink] today. You might survive for 4 days but good luck not tearing up your body and feeling like a ghost by then.
More-processed foods are not inherently "bad" or "unhealthy", but they are inherently worse and less healthy than less-processed foods (generally). They contribute to shorter periods of feeling satiated and longer low-energy periods. You will crave processed food more frequently and in greater quantities than raw food.
Your consequences of processed food does not seem to be actually be anything inherent to processed food. If there is some chemical (likely fiber in your examples?) that is causing one form of food to have a different effect from another, then that can be artificially processed into the food as well.
The real issue with processed foods tends to be that their goal is isolating the tasty by removing the healthy. If you actually set up the correct goals, then there is no particular reason why "natural foods" could not have their effects artificially replicated or improved upon.
Not to invalidate your argument, but clearly people fast for much longer than 4 days without food, for example "At the age of 74 and already slight of build, Mahatma Gandhi, the famous nonviolent campaigner for India's independence, survived 21 days of total starvation while only allowing himself sips of water." [1]
Of course it's not perfect. Could you do better by meticulously cataloging your intake, painstakingly measuring everything you cook, and going the extra mile to determine the exact source of all your food? Yeah probably. My time is worth more to me than that. I would rather waste my time on things other than making sure I am perfectly nourished.
How long had humans gone eating crude bread, grilled meat, and stuff they found on the ground? Now we have processing techniques more advanced than 'Make it hot' and we live longer now than ever before.
At least Soylent, as a company, is very up-front with their goals and concerns. They just sent me a message telling me not to eat the Soylent Bars I bought (Jokes on them I already threw them out because they are gross)
Also, Unless you eat the core and the seeds I think an apple and the quantity of apple juice you can make by squeezing one apple are probably going to be digested in a similar fashion. I get your point, I just don't think that is a good example.
The growth in our brain size is related to when we first figured out how to process (cook) food.
Lots of food is only considered edible once it's been processed. Look at wheat. Without the great length we go to mill flour, it's completely indigestible.
I think the Apple Juice example is a poor one, as it takes many apples to make one serving of apple juice, and you're leaving out the pulp, etc. This is exactly what we are talking about when we say that the composition matters, not how processed it is.
You have to care what the process is, not just that its "processed".
The argument is an appeal to nature. In the context of food, though, this argument has been anything but a fallacy in the past. It's not unreasonable to question whether a single-source producer of processed food stuffs is safe for everyone when consuming large quantities over a large period of time.
Do they know why their bars are making people sick, yet? What more subtle issues (contamination or formulaic deficiency) could be lurking, now, or in the future? It's clearly a risk, even with a lot of engineering know-how, especially this early in the game.
"Time spent at table doesn't age you" is one of my favorite sayings.
The real soylent sickness isn't replacing locally sourced, farm-to-table food with disgusting "food", as the author claims. The real soylent sickness is the culture of "meals are just input so I can keep working".
In most cases that's true, though by "working" I don't mean just actually working for someone else but rather doing anything I like.
I don't really care about food but I gotta eat it to do stuff I enjoy. Soylent helps out in that case because it fills me up, is healthy, and is quick.
I already have my nice dinner with girlfriend once a day, not every meal has to be like that. I'm not sure why anti-Soylent people believe Soylent users only drink Soylent.
i feel like this comes from the idea that "time spent not working is time wasted" -- as in, if elon musk works 90h weeks, everybody should too. and if you are not, you are wasting your life (startups in particular are full of those people).
i honestly feels like people forgot that there's more to life than working or making money or disrupting an industry. go lay down on a park and watch the sunset for goodness sake, it's good for you!
(in my case, i 1000% love cooking. it's a whole experience, even if it's just for me. cooking for myself is "me time", when i do things for myself, so i can enjoy)
Is something stopping you from going to a park _right now_ and sleeping in the grass until you wake up to watch the sunset? What, you would get hungry if you don't go home and cook dinner?
If only there was some convenient food you could pack with you that takes no time to prepare, little time to consume, and is easily transportable...
honestly? no. i work remotely for a company that has flexible hours. i did that a lot -- or even, go to the pool and enjoy a couple of hours of doing nothing by the pool.
i specifically chose a job that allows me to enjoy my life and my family.
> If only there was some convenient food you could pack with you that takes no time to prepare, little time to consume, and is easily transportable...
like sandwich? it takes me 10min to prepare a really tasty BLT that i can take anywhere.
That's exactly what meals are to me. I just don't care that much about enjoying food - certainly not enough to spend time on it. Grilling a seasoned steak once a week is more than enough reward-from-food for me.
Not terribly novel or interesting; the article entirely ignores that Soylent culture is driven by a disinterest in cooking and a desire to avoid the time spent during food preparation, cleanup, grocery shopping, etc.
Grocery shopping for one is frustrating; either I buy portions I know I can not eat before they spoil, wasting money and food, or I buy only a few ingredients and cycle through the same meals over and over. Last week I was annoyed to discover Kroger discontinued its half-dozen egg cartons, and I still have not found any reliable way of buying small enough quantities of bread/buns before they grow stale or mold. I'm fairly confident I am doomed to forever spoil cheese and milk. It seems that grocery chains market portions to target a household size of four, exclusively. Soylent, on the other hand, has a shelf-life of 1 year.
I've been freezing for the past several months and in practice thawing just means "Set the mac and cheese/chicken fingers/chili in the fridge so it's ready tomorrow". I have about half a months worth of meals for 2 in the freezer, plus some months worth in a deep freeze in the garage. Prep and planning isn't reduced that much except for overhead like driving to/from the store, most of it is just shifted to one big cooking night.
You seem convinced that subsisting on Soylent is the best idea. What about minimal preparation of meals + freezer bags + sous vide? That way you really don't have to worry about thawing. And prepping things like cuts of steak is really just salt/pepper/buttering it before freezing.
And for what it's worth, I thaw my meat in the fridge. Just throw it in there and it's taken care of in a safe, hygienic environment. Not really "a process in and of itself."
Flavor isn't the end-all be-all goal of food. I regularly drink soylent, and I could care less that it is basically tasteless. I drink it because it's cheap and takes ~15 seconds to open and finish. No grocery shopping for it, no cooking/meal prep required. When I'm eating alone, that is all I care about.
Soylent 1.6 (powder) is "$1.93 per 500 kcal" where 2000kcal is what most people eat a day. If a meal to you is one third of 2000kcal, it costs 1.93 * ((2000/500) / 3) == $2.57 per "meal."
Soylent 2.0 (drink, bought because it's "more convenient") is "$2.69 per 400 kcal." If a meal to you is one third of 2000kcal, it costs 2.69 * ((2000/400) / 3) == $4.48 per "meal."
So compare either of those to either your dinner or snack expenditures. To me it seems that 1.6 can save you money on dinner, while 2.0 is intended to help you save money on "snack time".
"Here is the computer calculated quantity of tasteless nutrient sludge necessary to maintain your productivity for the day" could very well be the first line out of a dystopian novel somewhere.
The same meal over and over does not sound appealing to anyone I think. Even I would not want to eat pizza 7 days a week.
But even putting your feelings aside, the issue with the same meal over and over is that it does not provide your body with what it needs. Soylent solves that: have Soylent and you don't have to worry about varying your meals, or about how much salt, sugar or fat you are eating.
And going back to the feelings side, Soylent feels different. It's supposed to be like that, and that somehow makes it feel much more okay. There are also variants that add flavors (making me worry about sugars again, but not as much as with normal food), for example I usually order a week's worth of food which comes in 5 different flavors (so you have two duplicates). I take about a year to consume them though, it's not like I run on Soylent full-time.
Somehow the same meal of neutral-tasing Soylent is more appealing than the same meal of some prepared food.
Maybe it's because drinking some Soylent isn't an 'activity' like eating a prepared meal is, but rather just something I do while doing something else, so I don't notice it as much (which I think is part of why it's designed to be neutral tasting).
I did soylent for a bit but reverted back to eating out for the majority of my meals. Theirs a lot of ways to mix soylent to mix up the flavor, my personal favorite was peanut butter, milk, and chocolate protein powder, that do a little bit to mix hinder the monotony.
Bread is super annoying in this regard. I eat a single slice every morning for breakfast, which means I can't go through a whole loaf before it starts getting moldy, or at least stale.
If you go to a supermarket where they bake bread, and they have whole loafs of in-store baked bread, they'll often be happy to sell you a half-loaf. Just take it to the bakery counter and ask if you can buy half the loaf.
Bread keeps for months if you freeze it immediately after buying it (slice it first if it doesn't come pre-sliced). Then, just pop it into the toaster whenever you want to eat some, and it comes right back to life, not stale-tasting at all. I don't eat food at home that often, but I haven't had to throw away any bread from mold or staleness since I started freezing it.
I think it sounds more like they are saying that it's a preference. Preferences are generally neither features nor bugs (though they can be useful in some situations and frustrating in others).
Not wanting to cook, and eating slurry which may or may not actually be healthy in the long run is hardly comparable. Lots of people don't want to cook, it is presumably a much smaller subset which would prefer the slurry.
We were discussing whether or not it's a "feature" that you don't have to cook and the rationale for that thinking is simply that some people don't want to cook. Whatever you replace the act of cooking with in that example is entirely up to you. But it's undeniably a feature to some people and were I not married I would very likely replace a few meals with something like this, if it was available to me where I live.
I find it interesting that there are so many of you that take offense to what other people choose to do with their own time and energy, as well as what they eat. Have you noticed a lot of people dislike people who try to force their lifestyles and/or dietary choices on other people? Do you see any similarities between those people and your own comments, perhaps?
Reading in offense to what I've said? It's not there. If anything, I'd say that my original comment caused offense, which I'm now having to manage. Typical, boring, but then, I did walk into this.
i can't imagine wanting to waste time on food, i've felt this way for as long as I can remember
I'm not talking about, or to people who use Soylent instead of a granola bar.
> Reading in offense to what I've said? It's not there.
I would hope that the reason you compared not wanting to cook with, again, a socially crippling disorder was that you were somehow offended by the idea of other people having different priorities than you.
I can understand someone having an emotional outburst because they're offended by other people not being like them, along with a lapse in judgment and ending up writing that comment, but I can't understand how someone would get there from a rational point of view. I assumed, charitably, that you were somehow offended.
And again, how much clearer can I be in that I'm not talking about that? You're welcome to ignore that fact, and go on these intensely boring rhetorical diversions, but it achieves nothing.
I'm sure the same could be said for a number of disabilities. The fact that you've compared an essentially unstudied liquid diet with indoor plumbing, and all other sources of food to hauling water, makes feel somewhat vindicated in my assessment. Not happy about it though, because it implies a kind of predatory relationship between Soylent marketing, and their intended demographic.
I can't tell you how few people I hear trumpeting it as a meal replacement now and then, vs. those who seem to have an extreme difficulty either with food, or food prep.
No, people who don't like cooking let other people cook for them and go out to eat or have food delivered. Soylent is for people who do not like to eat food. Big difference.
No, I don't think you can generalize like that. I like eating just fine, but I would consider Soylent if I wasn't married mostly because I just don't like cooking. Going out or ordering isn't financially all that feasible, whereas Soylent actually could be.
I don't think it has to be so black and white. There's room for a variety of small preferences to cause a person to choose one thing over another.
Going out to eat may be tastier, but it's generally more expensive. When it's not more expensive (than Soylent) it's often to some degree a mixture of the following:
1. Not vegan
2. Not tasty anyway (i.e. fast food)
3. More time consuming (the place that you like is far enough away)
I'm certain you can find other potential reasons.
Each of these may affect different people for different reasons and to different amounts (e.g. some may not care about vegan).
Ultimately, it's up to each person to decide on their own personal preferences, and the weigh their own perceived costs. For some, that may result in Soylent being a preferred option for some meals (these preferences are dynamic). For others, it's never a preferred option. That just seems like part of being human, to be honest; no sense for either side to get upset at the other.
As far as I'm concerned it is a feature. So many hours are completely wasted in meal prep that I could spend doing literally anything else. Like reading a book or not cooking.
>Like other valuable skills, you can get better at it.
I don't see how I can feasibly remove every other grocery shopper from the store when I go shopping. Or people who stop in the middle of the isle preventing traffic flow in both directions, kids acting up [0], the choice between annoying small-talk with the cashier or the annoyance of the faulty self-checkout machines [1]. People rushing around corners, nearly hitting people. The annoyance when the singular item you're searching for is out of stock that day. The store now has mounted televisions spamming ads for products on every other isle - now I get to shop with headphones on, yay!
I have control over nothing. There is nothing to get better at. Like driving (another annoying but necessary thing), it is something that so many people do without consideration or thought of others that the entire experience is ruined. I don't mind driving. I hate driving with other people on the road who cut across traffic, fail to signal, randomly brake for no reason, and otherwise drive like they are the only person on the road. Grocery shopping suffers the same fate: it sucks because everyone else seems to suck at it. And unlike driving on an empty road at two in the morning, there aren't many places I can go shopping for groceries at two in the morning.
It takes me less than ten minutes to purchase a week's worth of groceries. I've purchased the same exact things week in and week out for the past three years. I practically have my weekly trip down to a science. It seems to be that nobody else has figured out how to shop for groceries.
If you have a fix for removing other people from the equation that isn't illegal, I'd love to hear it.
[0] Kids act up, that's fine. I grew up with younger siblings. The difference is my mom would at least make an attempt to get them to stop throwing a tantrum in the middle of an aisle. It seems some parents have given up on the parenting part altogether.
[1] "Please bag your item." when the item has already been bagged. Continue until the clerk watching the self-checkouts comes over and kicks the machine out of the error loop. No way to enter "x20" of an item, I regularly purchase two dozen individually-packaged cans of chili. So I get to scan one of them 24 times and hope I don't lose track as there is no way to count how many I've already scanned.
Great point, suburban supermarkets do seem to be very bulk oriented.
Look into freezing. Way more things than you'd think handle freezing well. Cheese, bread (toast or even just warm it briefly before consuming for maximum tastiness), and milk for example. Not eggs unfortunately (yeah, I tried).
And some things are in between, eg bananas without skins can be frozen and eaten frozen, if you like the taste and texture, but you can't defrost them and get back a banana like you had before you froze it, it'll just be nasty goop.
So, if in doubt, just try freezing it and see what happens.
Also, turning the temperature on your fridge down may extend the life of some things (but will also waste more energy, so experiment to see if it's a good tradeoff)
> eg bananas without skins can be frozen and eaten frozen, if you like the taste and texture, but you can't defrost them and get back a banana like you had before you froze it, it'll just be nasty goop.
It's one of these foodstuffs where I'm pretty sure I can taste the difference when I get it fresh. And at a liter for 50cents, I really don't care about any savings in bulk.
These cheese bags will make your cheese last drastically longer. Plastic wrap condensation makes mold happen much faster. I buy Costco blocks of sharp cheddar and finish them myself, though I'll admit a certain fondness of cheese.
But also, most cheese mold is a surface only phenomenon. Remove what you can see and continue eating (doesn't apply to soft cheeses)
You might have an easier time finding that in a market, or corner store, than a supermarket, but you might not find everything you are looking for, and it might all be a bit more expensive than a supermarket. Depending on how many placed you go to show (taking more time), buying smaller portions at smaller stores may end up taking more time and cost close to the same amount as the larger portion. There's not a lot of incentive in that besides not being wasteful.
Also, you're probably unlikely to find much measured to 100 or 200 grams in any US supermarket. It's all ounces (both fluid and otherwise!) here. ;)
Then it is different than here in Spain (or in France an Italy), in every supermarket you can find half or a dozen eggs packs and the smaller butter pack is 4.4 ounces.
I've never seen half dozen egg cartons or single sticks of butter sold in supermarkets, but my experience is somewhat limited. Eggs and butter last for a while so I don't think this is really a big deal. And you can generally get as much meat as you want in the deli/butcher section of a supermarket.
>I've never seen half dozen egg cartons or single sticks of butter sold in supermarkets, but my experience is somewhat limited.
Just want to counter so the parent poster knows that yes, it is very common to find single sticks of butter or half-dozen egg cartons in many grocery stores. I can't think of any that don't have these things.
Yes, OP does not relate to my experiences at all. If there is one thing the US has no issues in it is consumer choice / variety. The only thing frustrating about grocery shopping for me is that I have to do it so often since I go through my ingredients so quickly.
When I was single I'd make family portion, eat 1/3, freeze the others. Bread freezes perfectly too. Other than that I shared your frustration of stores - buy a thing for £1, get three of them for £1.30. So choice of hugely overpay or risk waste. Milk prices are especially offensive under half gallon.
If you keep bread in the fridge, it'll keep for quite awhile & be available to eat (unlike freezing it).
I used to live in a country with giant, mean roaches, so I got in the habit of refrigerating everything. Surprised it's not more common to do so w/ bread.
On my experience, bread spoils faster in the fridge.
By the way, scientists still cannot describe chemical reactions in bread staleness. Contrary to popular belief, staleness is not really dryness, it's a complex chemical process.
I can confirm that lactose free milk never seems to go bad. And I don't know what the situation is in other cities, but in Seattle, it's ubiquitous, and it's not even specialized brands (e.g. Lactaid) any more.
Yeah here in the Bay Area there are multiple store brands that have lactose free, and they are almost all cheaper than Lactaid (although Lactaid seems to go on sale here a lot bringing it in line with the store brands).
I had noticed that as well. I wonder if it's because the lactose contributes to the process that makes it go bad, or because they treat it to make it last longer assuming it will move slower with a limited consumer base.
...
Ah, a little googling, and it turns out it's a byproduct of the procedure to remove the lactose, Ultra Pasteurization (UP) or Ultra High Temperature (UHT) pasteurization. [1]
I guess the quality of the food you have in the US is very different to what we have in Europe (or we just have lots of preservatives). Fresh milk usually lasts a week (I usually get the smallest 250ml pack), where as I can have 1 litre of UHT milk last a month without any noticeable difference. Cheese... well it lasts until it's eaten, it just goes a bit hard. I've had a packet of grated parmesan in the fridge for nearly a month, and a wedge of pecorino uncovered for two months, and both are still good.
In the US here. I bought milk a week ago that expires on Nov. 26th. Nearly every gallon I buy is good for at least 1.5 months. I don't buy the cheap store-brand gallon jug. I buy the nearly-cheap organic store-brand milk cartons.
It lasts as about the same. You can get the UHT most places i've been to, but it is not particular popular. The problem is more about purchasable quantity. 1/2 gallon (~2 liters) is the smallest "normal" size for Milk, you can definitely buy pints, and liters as well. The cost-per-unit definitely goes up below 1/2 gallon.
It is the same quality as you get in the EU. Milk lasts a week or so in the US as well. UHT is mostly unheard of in the US because people actually like the taste of milk... ;)
Someone who is buying real cheese in the US is not really in the wheelhouse for soylent, we are probably talking about a big block of mass-produced yellow cheddar here. Most likely it is being stored improperly in a ziploc bag or similar and the retained moisture is causing premature mold growth.
According to Wikipedia cheddar is the most popular cheese in the UK but not, it turns out, in the US. In the US the most popular cheese is apparently … mozzarella.
Not sure what any of this goes to prove (that Yanks eat a _lot_ of pizza?) but I guess I'm trying to say that I associate cheddar with British cheese-making in the same way I'd associate brie with French, edam and gouda with Dutch, feta with Greek, manchego with Spanish, and so on.
As a single, and lactose-intolerant, person, I've tend to search out milk that lasts a bit longer than one week, but I've still thrown quite a bit away.
I eventually switched to lactose-free milk, which lasts longer and theoretically lets me consume it more freely, but... I've thrown some of that away, too, since I just don't drink enough of it to be worth buying.
It may be worth noting that I can buy a gallon of milk for $1.79. Throwing away the spoiled remains isn't expensive for me, it just feels wasteful.
"I still have not found any reliable way of buying small enough quantities of bread/buns before they grow stale or mold."
The local bakery sells half loaves of bread which does a pretty good job of it. If that's a problem, I have friends who have bought bread makers which allow for the making of smaller portions.
As to milk, if you don't mind the taste of ultra-pasteurized milk, Fairlife[1] is pretty good and lasts a lot longer in the fridge. Their chocolate milk is really chocolatey.
That seems to be a very American problem. Portions of everything are just HUGE there, compared with other countries where there are more reasonable sized packages for a single person.
I agree. I'll never understand how people get so defensive in regards to SOMEONE ELSE's decision to change their diet. Soylent is a great solution for some. It's not for everyone (nothing is, not even food :P) - and I'm glad it works.
Less sarcastically -- I've come to find that learning how to not just cope with, but enjoy the food acquisition process, end-to-end -- from procurement, to cooking and prep, and yes, even washing dishes and maintaining a decent kitchen; but most of all, preparing delicious meals for friends, now and then (and all of this, on a shoestring budget, if necessary) -- to be one of the most valuable life skills one can acquire.
So if you're currently finding it "frustrating" -- that's a good thing, because it means that your body is correctly signaling you to the fact that there's not just an opportunity to learn, but to make great efficiency gains but just a modest investment in just... figuring out how food works.
Taking milk as an example -- you're absolutely right that the chains are wrongly optimized in a lot of their offerings; the quart- (or gallon-!) sized milk offerings being a great example. At the end of the day, "milk", as such, is just not a great item to have in one's list of staples -- yogurt and kefir provide very much the same nutritive value (and overall "milk-experience", in my view) with much better shelf life, and much better value per unit cost, overall. Or if you must have "milk", as such, just a small bottle of raw (or appropriately pasteurized) milk from a high quality dairy (this is crucial), which you'll find you'll need to drink only about 1/3 the amount of compared to the usual chain-offered "big dairy" milk, will do just fine.
But the thing about Soylent -- the really "real sickness" about it, in my view -- is that rather than address this frustration by getting to its root cause (lack of awareness of how food works, on a basic level; and how awesome things can be when you get your food supply right, or at least working for you, rather than against you) -- it simply masks it. And on top of that, rather insidiously promotes dependence (on a brand) -- rather than independence and self-sufficiency -- as a way of addressing the problem.
Your solution seems to be invest more time into learning how to grocery shop and prep food better, which supports the OPs argument that it is a real investment to make. Whereas the whole point of Soylent is the chance to skip this whole time investment and optimization process.
Some people would rather trade the highs/lows of grocery shopping and cooking for simple, healthy meals, but mostly bland meals. I don't think Soylent is the answer for everyone, it's a niche the same way Whole Foods is a niche. But they do have a real value prop that is easily overlooked if you only look at the food part of it, instead of all of the other processes around it.
Whereas the whole point of Soylent is the chance to skip this whole time investment and optimization process.
Right -- as with the entire junk food industry in general, basically.
As in: yes, there's certainly a big "value prop" in getting you past that next perceived craving (or legitimate nutritional need), as expediently as possible. But whether that provides a good "value" in the long run (either nutritionally or financially) is highly questionable.
That's the thing -- they're trying to convince people that their product is a "meal replacement". In the same way that caffeine and other stimulates are de-facto "sleep replacements" (and alcohol, a de-facto "self-esteem replacement") for many people. And indeed, most highly processed foods (a.k.a. "junk foods") have been successfully positioned as "replacements" for ... foods that actually come from farms, small bakeries and dairies, and so forth.
But whether any of these actually are viable "replacements" (considering long-term health and other side effects) is again very much open to question.
I think the idea of Soylent as a replacement for food is almost like an uncanny valley type affect for most people.
Food is life. If you've replaced food with some manufactured shake, it just seems fundamentally wrong. Meals aren't obligations, they are when people get together. They're a time to reflect and experience life. WTF are you doing that eating dinner is too much of a burden?
I can see using something like Soylent as a backup for fueling up while traveling or leaving it at your desk or in the car for a pinch situation. Full on food replacement conjures up images of lonely, single people giving up on life.
Your “lonely people giving up on life” is a huge reach. It’s just food. People are capable of socializing outside of meals.
Setting that aside for a moment, though, you also don’t have to replace every meal, as is mentioned elsewhere in the comments. How about just breakfast? Despite it being greatly beneficial to start the day with food, many people feel like they don’t have the time. Something quick, filling, and taking no preparation is ideal.
And I honestly doubt that anyone here or most places has an issue with Soylent as start-your-day food. After all, smoothies (often with all sorts of questionable "powerfood" additives) are a big thing these days. The hackles come up when it's promoted or discussed as a broader meal replacement.
And I honestly doubt that anyone here or most places has an issue with Soylent as start-your-day food.
"Powerfood" additives, being basically an orthogonal component -- aside, it's basically a powdered (or perhaps pasteurized concentrate, a la Minute Made) remake of the classic, fresh-everything version of your regular breakfast smoothie.
You don't see any issues with that?
The hackles come up when it's promoted or discussed as a broader meal replacement.
Which just so happens to be Soylent's business plan.
The standard counter to Soylent criticism though is that it's just an alternative to other quick meals on the go. Personally, I do often make smoothies in the morning and have never had a Soylent so I'm not going to argue against more natural is healthier--even if I'm not going to try to substantiate that general preference scientifically.
But yes. Their broader business plan and certainly what gets the press seems to be Soylent as broader meal replacement. If this were just another "nutritional drink on the go" absolutely no one would care.
Bread=wrap in foil, then in plastic bag, and freeze.
Milk=buy nonfat. Personally, I feel if your not going through a 1/2 gallon a week, you should drink more of the "poison". (Yea--it got a bad rap--I don't want to debate it.)
You got me on eggs. I just know most resturants don't refrigerate eggs. My eggs will last a few weeks on the frig.
My point is I get it. When I was in my twenties, I honestly didn't like eating. It was kinda a chore. I still only eat when I'm hunger, or feel weird. I do believe in caloric restriction.
If anyone want to spend their money on, essentially a marketing ploy, fine.
My best friend lived, basically unless we were out to dinner, or I was cooking for him, on Ensure for two years. We got it at Costco. He just got tired of putting stuff in microwaves. Yea--he was lazy, but he got a pass. He truly had a horrible chilhood/life. And he, honestly couldn't cook. He was born in the 40's. In a home where men don't cook.
Flour, beans, and rice will last a long time. Learning how to cook was a given in my childhood. It started out as a feminist thing in our household. The more my dad protested me cooking; the more my mom said it was fine. It got to the point, I could cook much better than my sister, and mother.
Later on, I became a cook on a resturant. We didn't call them Chefs. We were just cooks, and were taught in the kitchen.
Basically, cooking is easy. Every person should know how to cook up small meals. If you can learn programming, cooking is a breeze.
In relationships, I've done all the cooking. I told them, "My girlfriend/wife don't cook--we have evolved!". Yes--I was lying. They couldn't cook. The women in my generation, were so afraid they would be stuck home slaving over a hot stove, they really didn't know how to make anything other than a sandwich, or at least my girlfriends?
So just learn how to cook. It will make your life easier. It will save you money. And honestly, most resturant food tastes better because of two ingredients: fat, and salt. Or buy a marketing ploy? I just don't like to see money wasted.
(Oh, yea, buy a cheap small rice steamer. They are under $20. They are fool proof.)
I think the article actually does highlight a valid growing trend away from industrial processed foods and towards getting closer to the source for natural foods.
The meal replacement industry seems to be large enough to support this product and others, but it's still a niche, overall. It's fighting against a prevailing trend towards spending more time on food and not less, and understanding more about where our food comes from and how it's produced.
I think the root of these articles is that people don't understand what Soylent is. It's not meant to replace your home made salad, or "Fish pulled from a river and grilled over wood coals", but the frozen pizza you have when you come home late, or the "fuck it, I forgot to bring my lunch to work, let's just go to Arby's".
Do people complain that showers are meant to displace baths?
Good point, that is definitely part of the problem. Though granted I am a person who has it for lunch every day, so there is some wiggle room as to what it is for. Still, it is clearly not meant to replace all food consumption or even most of it.
>Soylent is a simple, efficient and affordable food that possesses what a body needs to be healthy. Soylent is a new option for maintaining a balanced state of ideal nutrition, just like traditional food.
If the author's assertion is true -- that "the most significant food movement is the purposeful pushback against the postwar industrial food system" -- then where is the demand for Soylent coming from? People clearly want it.
The real mistake here is the implication that everyone who consumes Soylent replaces 100% of their meals with it. That isn't the use case, and this has been explained many times. Soylent serves a specific purpose, just like astronaut ice cream, Tang, and TV dinners. The author says: "no one in their right mind would chose [astronaut ice cream] over the cold, creamy stuff on a hot day," but he's wrong. Many people did for the novelty, and many people prefer Soylent for its convenience.
Probably true. Organic is 'a way of farming that is more traditional' is a good way of phrasing it.
If you're looking for higher /quality control/ Kosher might be a good term to look for.
I know that when I buy ketchup I just go for the 'simple' variants, the ones that use the more traditional recipe and thus avoid HFCS (which I get too much of from other sources).
> If you're looking for higher /quality control/ Kosher might be a good term to look for.
Meh. Kosher slaughtering forbids the use of stunning (or otherwise incapaciting) an animal before slaughtering, so you're trading quality for animal cruelty in my opinion.
Edit: looks like at least some Islamic communities allow for stunning the animal prior to slaughter in order to qualify as "halal" meat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhabihah#Stunning). Depending on how many Jewish vs Muslim markets you have access to, a Muslim supermarket might be the better choice then.
Predictable reactionary article. Did they claim there was something wrong with the philosophy of people who produce spinach when that caused massive outbreaks of e-coli? Or blame the modernity of beef producers when mad-cow disease broke out?
Our culture is full of manufactured food that doesn't even attempt to provide nutrition. While it would be lovely if we could all eat out of our own private gardens and vineyards, something like soylent seems like a step in the right direction.
> Or blame the modernity of beef producers when mad-cow disease broke out?
The absolutely (and rightly) did blame modern beef production methods for this. It is one of the reasons that EU beef is better quality than US beef today.
> What Soylent and the latest batch of food-tech startups are aiming for takes us back to the days of astronaut ice cream.
What?
> Remember that stuff? It was developed as part of the space program in the nineteen-sixties, and you bought it in the sort of science stores that were toy stores for nerds. It was sweet. It came in ice-cream flavors. But it wasn’t ice cream, it was a simulation of ice cream, and no one in their right mind would chose it over the cold, creamy stuff on a hot day. Not even an astronaut.
Soylent isn’t a simulation of food. I’m pretty sure it explicitly chooses not to simulate food. And people are choosing to eat it.
Whats even more funny is that astronaut ice cream was never actually used by astronauts. It always has only been sold in the mentioned science stores. However I love the stuff, although I am probably not in my right mind. I have been skeptical of Soylent in the past, but if its like astronaut ice cream then sign me up! (yeah... i know... its nothing like astronaut ice cream)
The "End of Food" narrative for Soylent is artificial controversy created by the media to grab clicks. It's encouraged by the Soylent company because coverage -> sales. But, it was never the goal of the product and I don't think a large minority of the products users intend to use it as such.
Soylent is a great option to have when you want it. Slowly enjoying traditional food is still very nice. It's going to be OK.
I love the New Yorker. I have a subscription and I read it regularly.
I'm also a hedonistic participant in the "recent arc of food culture" that embraces locally grown ingredients prepared lovingly by chefs with a creative vision. Gramercy Tavern, the New York restaurant that most embodies this recent arc, takes a bite out of my paycheck multiple times a month.
But what the New Yorker assumes is that this kind of food, and the time and money to consume it is equally available to everyone at all times. That is absolutely not the case.
There are three key demographics for Soylent in my mind:
1. The efficiency obsessed engineer who will use Soylent as a primary food source.
2. Someone who has limited access to nutritious food due to geography or income and frequently prefers Soylent to the alternatives.
3. Someone who has the income and ability to enjoy well-prepared meals, and does so frequent,ly but occasionally finds themself unable to do so because of time or geography.
I'm in the last camp as are a number of my friends. Not enough time to get a proper breakfast - Soylent/Coffiest. Commuting to a client office for lunch and no good options nearby - Soylent. It is possible to make those choices and then enjoy a dinner where you relish the flavor and texture of the tomatillos in your salad.
Honestly, I don't think anyone can especially fault Soylent for scenario 3 in particular. It's not really much different from eating a yogurt or making a smoothie in the morning--or eating a trail bar of some sort mid-day. No one is accusing Cliff Bars of killing the leisurely lunch.
The bad press comes from the handful(?) of people who will tell anyone who will listen that their work is too important to do mundane things like cooking a meal.
The thing which Soylent gets right is trying to come at it from a nutrition standpoint first. That's definitely a much better starting place than the rest of the industrialized food world.
That said, I think the idea of a single optimal meal replacement is fundamentally flawed. Our understanding of nutrition and metabolism is still very rudimentary. My opinion is that it's dangerous to move away from whole foods today, not because of some natural food fallacy, but simply because we don't know everything that's going on with digestive and nutritional health. It may very well be the case that no single food is optimal to eat all the time, and that the body needs different rhythms of food intake over time to create baseline stresses for the organism to respond to metabolically.
I don't have a lot of insight into the science behind it, but one thing that always makes my partner (PhD in Epidemiolgy) slightly angry is that while Soylent does tick all of the "amount and type" boxes for what people consider to be part of a healthy nutrition, the real long term effects are basically untested.
Even in "naturally grown regular foods", the field is still pretty young and we can barely make good recommendations for those. They just happen to be what we eat and as long as they're not crazy processed, we have a few thousand years of experience with them not necessarily killing us immediately.
Areas of research like Metabolomics or Proteomics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omics) are still in their infancy, so while Soylent does mix a bunch of ingredients that all fall into the right areas, the long term effects are basically unknown. And that doesn't even take personalized medicine into consideration where your gene markup might actually have a lot to do with what might or might not be good for your personally.
Again, I don't have any insight besides some armchair quarterback knowledge about nutrition, but it seems like most people that do don't think it's a particularly great idea to eat it more than 'every now and then'.
That being said, when compared to twinkies and sugary sodas it might still be better for you. Having it as part of a daily diet though might not be a good idea.
So what, are they supposed to run a 100-year multi-generational clinical trial before they can sell Soylent?
If you don't think it will work, you don't have to eat it.
I'll keep eating Soylent (or whatever the current best whole-food is) every day and get back to you from my deathbed (to let you know if I blame Soylent)
The "That being said, when compared to twinkies and sugary sodas it might still be better for you. " part is how I justified regularly consuming it to myself despite there being so little science on the long term effects. Even with a typical fairly stocked Big Company cafeteria, I feel that it is easier for me to eat healthy every lunch by drinking Soylent rather than by getting food. But the lack of science is also why I only have it for lunch, which somehow feels like a fairly safe way to go about it. Hopefully we'll get some better science about it soon...
> when compared to twinkies and sugary sodas it might still be better for you
Might?
Like you hinted, this all seems like a valid argument to be made against any given modern diet. I can't imagine that even the most careful and educated person alive is eating meals that resemble what our ancestors had experience with for thousands of years.
So we can't necessarily rely on that, and we're waiting on feedback from fields you claim are in their infancy. It could be that a long-term soylent diet turns out to make you infertile, or that it repairs your body 1.5 times faster. I bet that the truth is probably somewhere closer to neutral, and I don't think that's as crazy a risk as you're making it out to be.
>That being said, when compared to twinkies and sugary sodas it might still be better for you. Having it as part of a daily diet though might not be a good idea.
If you also think that since we know so little about nutrition most of us should revert to eating exclusively meat and vegetables until further research is conducted because we started harvesting grains and potatoes off absolutely no research, then I think your argument is consistent. But otherwise your argument is, "we don't know much, but I like rice and my friends think Soylent is bad for you".
Not knowing much about nutrition doesn't make you unintelligent, but running around implying that something's a bad idea when you don't know what you're talking about is foolish at best and harmful at worst.
As I said, this is not necessarily my position but the position of someone with a PhD in nutritional Epidemiology who focuses her research on gene diet interaction. Seeing as I don't know anyone more competent than her, I'll just trust that judgement.
The various receptive components of your taste and olfactory system that have gradually figured out, over millions of years, how to not just detect spoiled or weak food sources, but to optimize for high-value sources also: by pinging your brain stem in just the right way, probably initiating signals within around 100 milliseconds or so of detecting threshold quantities of whatever awesome stuff your body has decided it needs (so it, in turn can deliver a more or less immediate, perfectly proportioned neurohormone cascade throughout both your brain and your upper torso, well before you've managed to actually digest and metabolize any portion of what you're consumed; "paying it forward", as it were) -- and not only that, but to literally train your brain stem into getting more and more of that awesome stuff, on as regular a basis as possible -- are really, really, super fiendishly clever at what they do.
In other words -- taste and smell (and texture, and the overall pleasure-centric aspects of the eating experience) matter a lot. And the primates over at companies like Soylent would have to be very cocky to think they throw all of that to the side, and replace it with a chemical formula or two.
This article is total FUD in my book. I drink soylent every day for at-work meals. I really appreciate the time savings, and having a zero effort/compromise way to go vegan (which I believe in both for ethical and environment reasons, but I haven't been able to commit to sustainably, personally).
Now here's why I disagree with this article so much: Besides programming, I'm an award winning BBQ chef that's cooking for a local food truck and soon a brick-and-mortar location. I am _very_ familiar with spending a lot of time on food. A longer cook might take 13 or 14 hours. I do this every week. And I _love_ that.
Understanding and enjoying the value of Soylent isn't an either/or thing. I love cooking at home, I spend lots of time in front of an oven or a smoker. I also appreciate Soylent as a healthy and inexpensive way to keep myself nourished when I don't want to think about food.
I wonder why the author would write this article without even making an attempt to understand how real people, not his hypothetical straw-man of a Soylent consumer, use the product.
> I wonder why the author would write this article without even making an attempt to understand how real people, not his hypothetical straw-man of a Soylent consumer, use the product.
> the quackery of Dr. Oz-approved “superfoods” and the idea that you can live forever if you just eat enough pomegranate seeds
Have they even read the ingredients list of soylent? It just has the basic macros, vitamins and minerals. It's less new age superfood than fortified flour.
> that is fundamentally the opposite of the way we increasingly want to eat in America
That's for the market to decide, not you, little New Yorker writer.
> When you look at the recent arc of food culture, the most significant food movement is the purposeful pushback against the postwar industrial food system
Funny, I thought the main trend was the death of family farms at the hands of Smithfield, Tyson et al.
The real sickness is modern animal agriculture, the rest is a rounding error in comparison.
The idea behind Soylent is a logical fallacy. On the one hand, Soylent relies on nutrition experts for the nutritional makeup of their food. On the other hand, no nutrition expert thinks it's a good idea eat Soylent instead of food.
So either you want to listen to nutrition experts or you don't. You can't have it both ways.
The number of scientifically rigorous and repeatable studies on human nutrition is shockingly small. The majority of the research that is done for the purposes of dietary recommendations involves survey or diary data.
I am aware of one controlled diet study--I think it was from the 1960s--where the participants were fed a semi-liquid diet which contained all the chemical components of what was then suspected to be complete human nutrition. The results could not be used, because too many of the subjects quit, or ate foods smuggled in from outside.
Knowing of that study, I have never feared that anyone would suffer some deficiency disease from eating nothing but Soylent. Because I think no one could accomplish such a feat for a long enough duration for any symptom to appear. I guarantee that unless the person is strapped down to a table for 23 hours a day and violently kept away from edible items for the 24th, they are, in fact, eating other things besides just Soylent from time to time.
So when nutritionists recommend against eating Soylent as a replacement for food, I have to wonder why they even think that is even plausible enough to say anything about it.
I understand completely why Cypher from The Matrix would sell out all of humanity for some virtual medium-rare tenderloin, instead of the nutrient slurry they have no choice about eating in the real world.
Nutrition experts recommending a different diet isn't very useful information. Most people probably don't eat a diet any given nutrition expert would approve.
But more practically: if a nutrition expert can point to hard scientific evidence that Soylent is missing something specific, then it can be added. If they can't, then they are just talking out of their ass.
Naming this product Soylent and watching the market accept it never ceases to amaze me; it's a lot like hearing Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life" on a Carnival Cruise commercial but getting flashbacks to Mark Renton on heroin.
The author seems to miss a critical part of why Soylent is a good options for many people; it is all the benefits of a low-work food product that strives not to be one that makes you fat or otherwise unhealthy. If anything, the industrial food system let down a lot of people who liked the 'easy' but didn't like the 'loaded with sugar' part. Also, of course, if you don't like it don't buy it.
"When you look at the recent arc of food culture, the most significant food movement is the purposeful pushback against the postwar industrial food system, a system that was the food futurism of its day. This industry brought us preservatives, Wonder Bread, Tang, and microwavable frozen TV dinners. It lowered the price of food tremendously and increased convenience in innumerable ways, but it also made us fatter and sicker, and robbed our meals of their original flavors,replacing them with addictive but unhealthy substances."
The only value I see in these Soylent type products, is for quick meals that someone would otherwise eat trashy food for. Breakfast comes to mind, and it what I use 100% Food mix for. It's quick and nutritional before I race off to the office. For every other meal, normal food.
What is the fascination with soylent? It's basically a supplement food bar / meal replacement. There are a million of these things on the market, already, right, in some kind of bar or powder form?
188 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 230 ms ] threadUh, speak for yourself.
I order Soylent from time-to-time. It's a nice way to simplify about 75% of my meal prep, while remaining healthy and helping me avoid constant snacking. If I was on my own I'd consider 100% Soylent.
You don't need three gourmet meals a day. Food is a convenient social activity, but it's not the only one.
So many issues with this article, but this one...
> the persistent effect that progress in food processing has had on our taste buds, as we amp up artificial flavors in an attempt regain the natural flavor we have stripped from our food with technology
If you'd ever had Soylent, you'd realize that it's entirely the opposite of an "amped-up, artificial flavour". It's not bland - it has a light flavour that isn't offensive no matter how much you drink.
Research has shown we get most of the nutrients we need from our first meal (of whole foods) each day. We only need calories from that point on. Shouldn't we then just try to get the most efficient form of calories, so long as those calories don't do harm? Leave the other 2 nutrient-rich meals for the rest of the world.
He frames it as "this is not what Americans want." But just because we can increasingly eat 3 nutrient-rich meals doesn't mean we should. In fact, it means the opposite -- that we should give those meals away because we can.
Not disagreeing but this is the first I've heard of this. Do you have any sources on hand?
Thats yet to be seen. This food is a processed as you can get, I have my doubts that it will be good for you in the long term.
from- https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/203709619-Soylent-...
I also enjoy saying "Numerous scientific studies have suggested..." while linking to none.
You are saying you disagree that the constituent components of an egg are the source of its nutritional value?
Do you suggest that something inside a chicken imbues in the egg ephemeral nutritional properties that our digestive system cannot extract from an equally proportioned mix of fat/cholesterol/protein/etc that was produced in a man-made factory rather than a hen?
The makers of Soylent, on the other hand, are pretty good at making broad sweeping nutritional claims without bothering to back them up with legitimate science.
But I know we absorb things differently depending on what we found them in. We absorb protein differently if they come from mat or from vegetables. We absorb calcium differently if it comes from milk or from a pill.
So in that case, I think think that assuming the nutritional value of some food comes only from its composition is a claim that needs serious backing.
In fact, this is such a stupid oversimplification that any amount of critical thinking can debunk it. There is a lot more to food that the net nutrition intake you have at the end of the day. The actual, physical composition of the food determines how quickly you body digests it, which in turn affects your energy levels, appetite, and mood. Your body does not digest apple juice the same way as it does raw apples, even if both have the same exact ingredients. You won't feel the same after a smoothie as you will after the same ingredients delivered raw. One method of intake gives you a short, high burst of energy followed by steeper drop off, while the raw form provides gentler changes and is less likely to spike your blood sugar.
All of this interacts with your psychology, your metabolism, and your physical and mental energy.
This is like saying I can safely fast for 4 days once If I eat 6000 calories worth of [insert food/drink] today. You might survive for 4 days but good luck not tearing up your body and feeling like a ghost by then.
More-processed foods are not inherently "bad" or "unhealthy", but they are inherently worse and less healthy than less-processed foods (generally). They contribute to shorter periods of feeling satiated and longer low-energy periods. You will crave processed food more frequently and in greater quantities than raw food.
The real issue with processed foods tends to be that their goal is isolating the tasty by removing the healthy. If you actually set up the correct goals, then there is no particular reason why "natural foods" could not have their effects artificially replicated or improved upon.
1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-can-a-pe...
Though they do address things like blood sugar in similar articles: https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/212769503-Glycemic...
Of course it's not perfect. Could you do better by meticulously cataloging your intake, painstakingly measuring everything you cook, and going the extra mile to determine the exact source of all your food? Yeah probably. My time is worth more to me than that. I would rather waste my time on things other than making sure I am perfectly nourished.
How long had humans gone eating crude bread, grilled meat, and stuff they found on the ground? Now we have processing techniques more advanced than 'Make it hot' and we live longer now than ever before.
At least Soylent, as a company, is very up-front with their goals and concerns. They just sent me a message telling me not to eat the Soylent Bars I bought (Jokes on them I already threw them out because they are gross)
Also, Unless you eat the core and the seeds I think an apple and the quantity of apple juice you can make by squeezing one apple are probably going to be digested in a similar fashion. I get your point, I just don't think that is a good example.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/07/24/3549931.ht...
>.. but they are inherently worse and less healthy than less-processed foods (generally)
this is such a stupid oversimplification that any amount of critical thinking can debunk it.
Lots of food is only considered edible once it's been processed. Look at wheat. Without the great length we go to mill flour, it's completely indigestible.
I think the Apple Juice example is a poor one, as it takes many apples to make one serving of apple juice, and you're leaving out the pulp, etc. This is exactly what we are talking about when we say that the composition matters, not how processed it is. You have to care what the process is, not just that its "processed".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy
Do they know why their bars are making people sick, yet? What more subtle issues (contamination or formulaic deficiency) could be lurking, now, or in the future? It's clearly a risk, even with a lot of engineering know-how, especially this early in the game.
The real soylent sickness isn't replacing locally sourced, farm-to-table food with disgusting "food", as the author claims. The real soylent sickness is the culture of "meals are just input so I can keep working".
I don't really care about food but I gotta eat it to do stuff I enjoy. Soylent helps out in that case because it fills me up, is healthy, and is quick.
I already have my nice dinner with girlfriend once a day, not every meal has to be like that. I'm not sure why anti-Soylent people believe Soylent users only drink Soylent.
i honestly feels like people forgot that there's more to life than working or making money or disrupting an industry. go lay down on a park and watch the sunset for goodness sake, it's good for you!
(in my case, i 1000% love cooking. it's a whole experience, even if it's just for me. cooking for myself is "me time", when i do things for myself, so i can enjoy)
If only there was some convenient food you could pack with you that takes no time to prepare, little time to consume, and is easily transportable...
i specifically chose a job that allows me to enjoy my life and my family.
> If only there was some convenient food you could pack with you that takes no time to prepare, little time to consume, and is easily transportable...
like sandwich? it takes me 10min to prepare a really tasty BLT that i can take anywhere.
Grocery shopping for one is frustrating; either I buy portions I know I can not eat before they spoil, wasting money and food, or I buy only a few ingredients and cycle through the same meals over and over. Last week I was annoyed to discover Kroger discontinued its half-dozen egg cartons, and I still have not found any reliable way of buying small enough quantities of bread/buns before they grow stale or mold. I'm fairly confident I am doomed to forever spoil cheese and milk. It seems that grocery chains market portions to target a household size of four, exclusively. Soylent, on the other hand, has a shelf-life of 1 year.
Besides, most people's freezers aren't big enough to store an entire grocery shopping's worth of goods.
And for what it's worth, I thaw my meat in the fridge. Just throw it in there and it's taken care of in a safe, hygienic environment. Not really "a process in and of itself."
I never said that.
https://breakingbelgium.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/bachelor...
Soylent 1.6 (powder) is "$1.93 per 500 kcal" where 2000kcal is what most people eat a day. If a meal to you is one third of 2000kcal, it costs 1.93 * ((2000/500) / 3) == $2.57 per "meal."
Soylent 2.0 (drink, bought because it's "more convenient") is "$2.69 per 400 kcal." If a meal to you is one third of 2000kcal, it costs 2.69 * ((2000/400) / 3) == $4.48 per "meal."
So compare either of those to either your dinner or snack expenditures. To me it seems that 1.6 can save you money on dinner, while 2.0 is intended to help you save money on "snack time".
Too much flavor could make it annoying to have regularly day after day. They're specifically aiming for a neutral flavor.
>Maybe even a little rebranding?
Yes, they know they sound like "Soylent Green". It's the point and gets you to recognize the name.
But even putting your feelings aside, the issue with the same meal over and over is that it does not provide your body with what it needs. Soylent solves that: have Soylent and you don't have to worry about varying your meals, or about how much salt, sugar or fat you are eating.
And going back to the feelings side, Soylent feels different. It's supposed to be like that, and that somehow makes it feel much more okay. There are also variants that add flavors (making me worry about sugars again, but not as much as with normal food), for example I usually order a week's worth of food which comes in 5 different flavors (so you have two duplicates). I take about a year to consume them though, it's not like I run on Soylent full-time.
I eat exactly the same breakfast and lunch 5-7 days a week. It's easy, relatively cheap, and the routine keeps me from screwing up my calorie counts.
Dinner has some more variety, but I'd be up for pizza every day if it weren't for the cost and health issues.
Not a totally fair comparison here, since our neighborhood pizza places routinely show up on "best pizza in the US" lists...
Maybe it's because drinking some Soylent isn't an 'activity' like eating a prepared meal is, but rather just something I do while doing something else, so I don't notice it as much (which I think is part of why it's designed to be neutral tasting).
Bread keeps for months if you freeze it immediately after buying it (slice it first if it doesn't come pre-sliced). Then, just pop it into the toaster whenever you want to eat some, and it comes right back to life, not stale-tasting at all. I don't eat food at home that often, but I haven't had to throw away any bread from mold or staleness since I started freezing it.
You say this like it's a feature not a bug.
> Grocery shopping for one is frustrating
Like other valuable skills, you can get better at it.
I think it sounds more like they are saying that it's a preference. Preferences are generally neither features nor bugs (though they can be useful in some situations and frustrating in others).
I find it interesting that there are so many of you that take offense to what other people choose to do with their own time and energy, as well as what they eat. Have you noticed a lot of people dislike people who try to force their lifestyles and/or dietary choices on other people? Do you see any similarities between those people and your own comments, perhaps?
i can't imagine wanting to waste time on food, i've felt this way for as long as I can remember
I'm not talking about, or to people who use Soylent instead of a granola bar.
I would hope that the reason you compared not wanting to cook with, again, a socially crippling disorder was that you were somehow offended by the idea of other people having different priorities than you.
I can understand someone having an emotional outburst because they're offended by other people not being like them, along with a lapse in judgment and ending up writing that comment, but I can't understand how someone would get there from a rational point of view. I assumed, charitably, that you were somehow offended.
And again, how much clearer can I be in that I'm not talking about that? You're welcome to ignore that fact, and go on these intensely boring rhetorical diversions, but it achieves nothing.
i can't imagine wanting to waste time on food, i've felt this way for as long as I can remember
I can't tell you how few people I hear trumpeting it as a meal replacement now and then, vs. those who seem to have an extreme difficulty either with food, or food prep.
Going out to eat may be tastier, but it's generally more expensive. When it's not more expensive (than Soylent) it's often to some degree a mixture of the following:
1. Not vegan
2. Not tasty anyway (i.e. fast food)
3. More time consuming (the place that you like is far enough away)
I'm certain you can find other potential reasons.
Each of these may affect different people for different reasons and to different amounts (e.g. some may not care about vegan).
Ultimately, it's up to each person to decide on their own personal preferences, and the weigh their own perceived costs. For some, that may result in Soylent being a preferred option for some meals (these preferences are dynamic). For others, it's never a preferred option. That just seems like part of being human, to be honest; no sense for either side to get upset at the other.
As far as I'm concerned it is a feature. So many hours are completely wasted in meal prep that I could spend doing literally anything else. Like reading a book or not cooking.
>Like other valuable skills, you can get better at it.
I don't see how I can feasibly remove every other grocery shopper from the store when I go shopping. Or people who stop in the middle of the isle preventing traffic flow in both directions, kids acting up [0], the choice between annoying small-talk with the cashier or the annoyance of the faulty self-checkout machines [1]. People rushing around corners, nearly hitting people. The annoyance when the singular item you're searching for is out of stock that day. The store now has mounted televisions spamming ads for products on every other isle - now I get to shop with headphones on, yay!
I have control over nothing. There is nothing to get better at. Like driving (another annoying but necessary thing), it is something that so many people do without consideration or thought of others that the entire experience is ruined. I don't mind driving. I hate driving with other people on the road who cut across traffic, fail to signal, randomly brake for no reason, and otherwise drive like they are the only person on the road. Grocery shopping suffers the same fate: it sucks because everyone else seems to suck at it. And unlike driving on an empty road at two in the morning, there aren't many places I can go shopping for groceries at two in the morning.
It takes me less than ten minutes to purchase a week's worth of groceries. I've purchased the same exact things week in and week out for the past three years. I practically have my weekly trip down to a science. It seems to be that nobody else has figured out how to shop for groceries.
If you have a fix for removing other people from the equation that isn't illegal, I'd love to hear it.
[0] Kids act up, that's fine. I grew up with younger siblings. The difference is my mom would at least make an attempt to get them to stop throwing a tantrum in the middle of an aisle. It seems some parents have given up on the parenting part altogether.
[1] "Please bag your item." when the item has already been bagged. Continue until the clerk watching the self-checkouts comes over and kicks the machine out of the error loop. No way to enter "x20" of an item, I regularly purchase two dozen individually-packaged cans of chili. So I get to scan one of them 24 times and hope I don't lose track as there is no way to count how many I've already scanned.
Look into freezing. Way more things than you'd think handle freezing well. Cheese, bread (toast or even just warm it briefly before consuming for maximum tastiness), and milk for example. Not eggs unfortunately (yeah, I tried).
And some things are in between, eg bananas without skins can be frozen and eaten frozen, if you like the taste and texture, but you can't defrost them and get back a banana like you had before you froze it, it'll just be nasty goop.
So, if in doubt, just try freezing it and see what happens.
Also, turning the temperature on your fridge down may extend the life of some things (but will also waste more energy, so experiment to see if it's a good tradeoff)
http://www.thatrecipe.com/blog/2014/03/06/daniel-tiger-banan...
But also, most cheese mold is a surface only phenomenon. Remove what you can see and continue eating (doesn't apply to soft cheeses)
https://www.amazon.com/Formaticum-Cheese-Storage-Bags-Count/...
There are various other storage techniques for making food last longer which you might try.
With a taste and mouth-feel to match. Bon appetit!
Also, you're probably unlikely to find much measured to 100 or 200 grams in any US supermarket. It's all ounces (both fluid and otherwise!) here. ;)
Just want to counter so the parent poster knows that yes, it is very common to find single sticks of butter or half-dozen egg cartons in many grocery stores. I can't think of any that don't have these things.
When I was single I'd make family portion, eat 1/3, freeze the others. Bread freezes perfectly too. Other than that I shared your frustration of stores - buy a thing for £1, get three of them for £1.30. So choice of hugely overpay or risk waste. Milk prices are especially offensive under half gallon.
If you sterilize the shells and dip them in mineral oil or cheese wax, they can be kept at room temperature for much longer.
I used to live in a country with giant, mean roaches, so I got in the habit of refrigerating everything. Surprised it's not more common to do so w/ bread.
We buy 1.5 gallons at Costco for the two of us and never had it go bad.
...
Ah, a little googling, and it turns out it's a byproduct of the procedure to remove the lactose, Ultra Pasteurization (UP) or Ultra High Temperature (UHT) pasteurization. [1]
1: http://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/34884/why-does-...
I guess the quality of the food you have in the US is very different to what we have in Europe (or we just have lots of preservatives). Fresh milk usually lasts a week (I usually get the smallest 250ml pack), where as I can have 1 litre of UHT milk last a month without any noticeable difference. Cheese... well it lasts until it's eaten, it just goes a bit hard. I've had a packet of grated parmesan in the fridge for nearly a month, and a wedge of pecorino uncovered for two months, and both are still good.
Someone who is buying real cheese in the US is not really in the wheelhouse for soylent, we are probably talking about a big block of mass-produced yellow cheddar here. Most likely it is being stored improperly in a ziploc bag or similar and the retained moisture is causing premature mold growth.
According to Wikipedia cheddar is the most popular cheese in the UK but not, it turns out, in the US. In the US the most popular cheese is apparently … mozzarella.
Not sure what any of this goes to prove (that Yanks eat a _lot_ of pizza?) but I guess I'm trying to say that I associate cheddar with British cheese-making in the same way I'd associate brie with French, edam and gouda with Dutch, feta with Greek, manchego with Spanish, and so on.
I eventually switched to lactose-free milk, which lasts longer and theoretically lets me consume it more freely, but... I've thrown some of that away, too, since I just don't drink enough of it to be worth buying.
It may be worth noting that I can buy a gallon of milk for $1.79. Throwing away the spoiled remains isn't expensive for me, it just feels wasteful.
The local bakery sells half loaves of bread which does a pretty good job of it. If that's a problem, I have friends who have bought bread makers which allow for the making of smaller portions.
As to milk, if you don't mind the taste of ultra-pasteurized milk, Fairlife[1] is pretty good and lasts a lot longer in the fridge. Their chocolate milk is really chocolatey.
1) technically fa!rlife
Less sarcastically -- I've come to find that learning how to not just cope with, but enjoy the food acquisition process, end-to-end -- from procurement, to cooking and prep, and yes, even washing dishes and maintaining a decent kitchen; but most of all, preparing delicious meals for friends, now and then (and all of this, on a shoestring budget, if necessary) -- to be one of the most valuable life skills one can acquire.
So if you're currently finding it "frustrating" -- that's a good thing, because it means that your body is correctly signaling you to the fact that there's not just an opportunity to learn, but to make great efficiency gains but just a modest investment in just... figuring out how food works.
Taking milk as an example -- you're absolutely right that the chains are wrongly optimized in a lot of their offerings; the quart- (or gallon-!) sized milk offerings being a great example. At the end of the day, "milk", as such, is just not a great item to have in one's list of staples -- yogurt and kefir provide very much the same nutritive value (and overall "milk-experience", in my view) with much better shelf life, and much better value per unit cost, overall. Or if you must have "milk", as such, just a small bottle of raw (or appropriately pasteurized) milk from a high quality dairy (this is crucial), which you'll find you'll need to drink only about 1/3 the amount of compared to the usual chain-offered "big dairy" milk, will do just fine.
But the thing about Soylent -- the really "real sickness" about it, in my view -- is that rather than address this frustration by getting to its root cause (lack of awareness of how food works, on a basic level; and how awesome things can be when you get your food supply right, or at least working for you, rather than against you) -- it simply masks it. And on top of that, rather insidiously promotes dependence (on a brand) -- rather than independence and self-sufficiency -- as a way of addressing the problem.
Some people would rather trade the highs/lows of grocery shopping and cooking for simple, healthy meals, but mostly bland meals. I don't think Soylent is the answer for everyone, it's a niche the same way Whole Foods is a niche. But they do have a real value prop that is easily overlooked if you only look at the food part of it, instead of all of the other processes around it.
Right -- as with the entire junk food industry in general, basically.
As in: yes, there's certainly a big "value prop" in getting you past that next perceived craving (or legitimate nutritional need), as expediently as possible. But whether that provides a good "value" in the long run (either nutritionally or financially) is highly questionable.
But whether any of these actually are viable "replacements" (considering long-term health and other side effects) is again very much open to question.
Food is life. If you've replaced food with some manufactured shake, it just seems fundamentally wrong. Meals aren't obligations, they are when people get together. They're a time to reflect and experience life. WTF are you doing that eating dinner is too much of a burden?
I can see using something like Soylent as a backup for fueling up while traveling or leaving it at your desk or in the car for a pinch situation. Full on food replacement conjures up images of lonely, single people giving up on life.
Your “lonely people giving up on life” is a huge reach. It’s just food. People are capable of socializing outside of meals.
Setting that aside for a moment, though, you also don’t have to replace every meal, as is mentioned elsewhere in the comments. How about just breakfast? Despite it being greatly beneficial to start the day with food, many people feel like they don’t have the time. Something quick, filling, and taking no preparation is ideal.
"Powerfood" additives, being basically an orthogonal component -- aside, it's basically a powdered (or perhaps pasteurized concentrate, a la Minute Made) remake of the classic, fresh-everything version of your regular breakfast smoothie.
You don't see any issues with that?
The hackles come up when it's promoted or discussed as a broader meal replacement.
Which just so happens to be Soylent's business plan.
But yes. Their broader business plan and certainly what gets the press seems to be Soylent as broader meal replacement. If this were just another "nutritional drink on the go" absolutely no one would care.
Milk=buy nonfat. Personally, I feel if your not going through a 1/2 gallon a week, you should drink more of the "poison". (Yea--it got a bad rap--I don't want to debate it.)
You got me on eggs. I just know most resturants don't refrigerate eggs. My eggs will last a few weeks on the frig.
My point is I get it. When I was in my twenties, I honestly didn't like eating. It was kinda a chore. I still only eat when I'm hunger, or feel weird. I do believe in caloric restriction.
If anyone want to spend their money on, essentially a marketing ploy, fine.
My best friend lived, basically unless we were out to dinner, or I was cooking for him, on Ensure for two years. We got it at Costco. He just got tired of putting stuff in microwaves. Yea--he was lazy, but he got a pass. He truly had a horrible chilhood/life. And he, honestly couldn't cook. He was born in the 40's. In a home where men don't cook.
Flour, beans, and rice will last a long time. Learning how to cook was a given in my childhood. It started out as a feminist thing in our household. The more my dad protested me cooking; the more my mom said it was fine. It got to the point, I could cook much better than my sister, and mother.
Later on, I became a cook on a resturant. We didn't call them Chefs. We were just cooks, and were taught in the kitchen.
Basically, cooking is easy. Every person should know how to cook up small meals. If you can learn programming, cooking is a breeze.
In relationships, I've done all the cooking. I told them, "My girlfriend/wife don't cook--we have evolved!". Yes--I was lying. They couldn't cook. The women in my generation, were so afraid they would be stuck home slaving over a hot stove, they really didn't know how to make anything other than a sandwich, or at least my girlfriends?
So just learn how to cook. It will make your life easier. It will save you money. And honestly, most resturant food tastes better because of two ingredients: fat, and salt. Or buy a marketing ploy? I just don't like to see money wasted.
(Oh, yea, buy a cheap small rice steamer. They are under $20. They are fool proof.)
The meal replacement industry seems to be large enough to support this product and others, but it's still a niche, overall. It's fighting against a prevailing trend towards spending more time on food and not less, and understanding more about where our food comes from and how it's produced.
Do people complain that showers are meant to displace baths?
They did when showers first started replacing baths in the 1800's.
>Soylent is a simple, efficient and affordable food that possesses what a body needs to be healthy. Soylent is a new option for maintaining a balanced state of ideal nutrition, just like traditional food.
Source: https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/212767043-What-is-...
The real mistake here is the implication that everyone who consumes Soylent replaces 100% of their meals with it. That isn't the use case, and this has been explained many times. Soylent serves a specific purpose, just like astronaut ice cream, Tang, and TV dinners. The author says: "no one in their right mind would chose [astronaut ice cream] over the cold, creamy stuff on a hot day," but he's wrong. Many people did for the novelty, and many people prefer Soylent for its convenience.
I think this is only true if you are upper middle class or above.
If you're looking for higher /quality control/ Kosher might be a good term to look for.
I know that when I buy ketchup I just go for the 'simple' variants, the ones that use the more traditional recipe and thus avoid HFCS (which I get too much of from other sources).
Meh. Kosher slaughtering forbids the use of stunning (or otherwise incapaciting) an animal before slaughtering, so you're trading quality for animal cruelty in my opinion.
Edit: looks like at least some Islamic communities allow for stunning the animal prior to slaughter in order to qualify as "halal" meat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhabihah#Stunning). Depending on how many Jewish vs Muslim markets you have access to, a Muslim supermarket might be the better choice then.
Our culture is full of manufactured food that doesn't even attempt to provide nutrition. While it would be lovely if we could all eat out of our own private gardens and vineyards, something like soylent seems like a step in the right direction.
The absolutely (and rightly) did blame modern beef production methods for this. It is one of the reasons that EU beef is better quality than US beef today.
What?
> Remember that stuff? It was developed as part of the space program in the nineteen-sixties, and you bought it in the sort of science stores that were toy stores for nerds. It was sweet. It came in ice-cream flavors. But it wasn’t ice cream, it was a simulation of ice cream, and no one in their right mind would chose it over the cold, creamy stuff on a hot day. Not even an astronaut.
Soylent isn’t a simulation of food. I’m pretty sure it explicitly chooses not to simulate food. And people are choosing to eat it.
As others have said, speak for yourself.
Soylent is a great option to have when you want it. Slowly enjoying traditional food is still very nice. It's going to be OK.
That's how Soylent marketed it before and during the kickstarter.
I'm also a hedonistic participant in the "recent arc of food culture" that embraces locally grown ingredients prepared lovingly by chefs with a creative vision. Gramercy Tavern, the New York restaurant that most embodies this recent arc, takes a bite out of my paycheck multiple times a month.
But what the New Yorker assumes is that this kind of food, and the time and money to consume it is equally available to everyone at all times. That is absolutely not the case.
There are three key demographics for Soylent in my mind:
1. The efficiency obsessed engineer who will use Soylent as a primary food source.
2. Someone who has limited access to nutritious food due to geography or income and frequently prefers Soylent to the alternatives.
3. Someone who has the income and ability to enjoy well-prepared meals, and does so frequent,ly but occasionally finds themself unable to do so because of time or geography.
I'm in the last camp as are a number of my friends. Not enough time to get a proper breakfast - Soylent/Coffiest. Commuting to a client office for lunch and no good options nearby - Soylent. It is possible to make those choices and then enjoy a dinner where you relish the flavor and texture of the tomatillos in your salad.
4. Does not really enjoy eating food.
Spending time/money/energy on good food is completely pointless for some people (e.g. friend with anosmia).
The bad press comes from the handful(?) of people who will tell anyone who will listen that their work is too important to do mundane things like cooking a meal.
That said, I think the idea of a single optimal meal replacement is fundamentally flawed. Our understanding of nutrition and metabolism is still very rudimentary. My opinion is that it's dangerous to move away from whole foods today, not because of some natural food fallacy, but simply because we don't know everything that's going on with digestive and nutritional health. It may very well be the case that no single food is optimal to eat all the time, and that the body needs different rhythms of food intake over time to create baseline stresses for the organism to respond to metabolically.
Even in "naturally grown regular foods", the field is still pretty young and we can barely make good recommendations for those. They just happen to be what we eat and as long as they're not crazy processed, we have a few thousand years of experience with them not necessarily killing us immediately.
Areas of research like Metabolomics or Proteomics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omics) are still in their infancy, so while Soylent does mix a bunch of ingredients that all fall into the right areas, the long term effects are basically unknown. And that doesn't even take personalized medicine into consideration where your gene markup might actually have a lot to do with what might or might not be good for your personally.
Again, I don't have any insight besides some armchair quarterback knowledge about nutrition, but it seems like most people that do don't think it's a particularly great idea to eat it more than 'every now and then'.
That being said, when compared to twinkies and sugary sodas it might still be better for you. Having it as part of a daily diet though might not be a good idea.
If you don't think it will work, you don't have to eat it. I'll keep eating Soylent (or whatever the current best whole-food is) every day and get back to you from my deathbed (to let you know if I blame Soylent)
Might?
Like you hinted, this all seems like a valid argument to be made against any given modern diet. I can't imagine that even the most careful and educated person alive is eating meals that resemble what our ancestors had experience with for thousands of years.
So we can't necessarily rely on that, and we're waiting on feedback from fields you claim are in their infancy. It could be that a long-term soylent diet turns out to make you infertile, or that it repairs your body 1.5 times faster. I bet that the truth is probably somewhere closer to neutral, and I don't think that's as crazy a risk as you're making it out to be.
If you also think that since we know so little about nutrition most of us should revert to eating exclusively meat and vegetables until further research is conducted because we started harvesting grains and potatoes off absolutely no research, then I think your argument is consistent. But otherwise your argument is, "we don't know much, but I like rice and my friends think Soylent is bad for you".
Not knowing much about nutrition doesn't make you unintelligent, but running around implying that something's a bad idea when you don't know what you're talking about is foolish at best and harmful at worst.
In other words -- taste and smell (and texture, and the overall pleasure-centric aspects of the eating experience) matter a lot. And the primates over at companies like Soylent would have to be very cocky to think they throw all of that to the side, and replace it with a chemical formula or two.
Soylent is based in Los Angeles.
Now here's why I disagree with this article so much: Besides programming, I'm an award winning BBQ chef that's cooking for a local food truck and soon a brick-and-mortar location. I am _very_ familiar with spending a lot of time on food. A longer cook might take 13 or 14 hours. I do this every week. And I _love_ that.
Understanding and enjoying the value of Soylent isn't an either/or thing. I love cooking at home, I spend lots of time in front of an oven or a smoker. I also appreciate Soylent as a healthy and inexpensive way to keep myself nourished when I don't want to think about food.
I wonder why the author would write this article without even making an attempt to understand how real people, not his hypothetical straw-man of a Soylent consumer, use the product.
That article wouldn't generate as many clicks :/
Have they even read the ingredients list of soylent? It just has the basic macros, vitamins and minerals. It's less new age superfood than fortified flour.
> that is fundamentally the opposite of the way we increasingly want to eat in America
That's for the market to decide, not you, little New Yorker writer.
> When you look at the recent arc of food culture, the most significant food movement is the purposeful pushback against the postwar industrial food system
Funny, I thought the main trend was the death of family farms at the hands of Smithfield, Tyson et al.
The real sickness is modern animal agriculture, the rest is a rounding error in comparison.
So either you want to listen to nutrition experts or you don't. You can't have it both ways.
I am aware of one controlled diet study--I think it was from the 1960s--where the participants were fed a semi-liquid diet which contained all the chemical components of what was then suspected to be complete human nutrition. The results could not be used, because too many of the subjects quit, or ate foods smuggled in from outside.
Knowing of that study, I have never feared that anyone would suffer some deficiency disease from eating nothing but Soylent. Because I think no one could accomplish such a feat for a long enough duration for any symptom to appear. I guarantee that unless the person is strapped down to a table for 23 hours a day and violently kept away from edible items for the 24th, they are, in fact, eating other things besides just Soylent from time to time.
So when nutritionists recommend against eating Soylent as a replacement for food, I have to wonder why they even think that is even plausible enough to say anything about it.
I understand completely why Cypher from The Matrix would sell out all of humanity for some virtual medium-rare tenderloin, instead of the nutrient slurry they have no choice about eating in the real world.
But more practically: if a nutrition expert can point to hard scientific evidence that Soylent is missing something specific, then it can be added. If they can't, then they are just talking out of their ass.
"When you look at the recent arc of food culture, the most significant food movement is the purposeful pushback against the postwar industrial food system, a system that was the food futurism of its day. This industry brought us preservatives, Wonder Bread, Tang, and microwavable frozen TV dinners. It lowered the price of food tremendously and increased convenience in innumerable ways, but it also made us fatter and sicker, and robbed our meals of their original flavors,replacing them with addictive but unhealthy substances."