Looking forward to this. There has been a lot of FUD, and I think some of it is valid, so I'm choosing the 1 week supply option to give it a try. I'd like to replace 1 of my meals each day with this, I hate having to deal with cooking and cleaning up in small temporary apartments.
I hope you enjoy it! It'd be interesting to hear how you get on.
If you decide you don't like soylent there are a bunch of other products from other more mainstream manufacturers.
Fortisip and Ensure are the two brands I'm most familiar with, but there are others. Fortisip do wide range of different style products (shake, juice, yoghurt, and 'savory'.) But it's an acquired taste.
You might want to avoid Ensure. In a test where it was used in place of the standard glucose solution for an oral glucose tolerance test, it caused 2 hour blood glucose levels over 180 mg/dl in some subjects.
Sure, it's marketed as having a low glycemic index — but the GI of chocolate cake and ice cream is even lower...
Be very, very careful. Ideally, if you can afford it, have a doctor evaluate your health (particularly blood chemistry) before and then after a few weeks. Not only would it be useful to you, it'd be informative to everyone considering this.
I've been following this for a while, and I'm excited to see it start to come together. I hope a lot of people aren't turned off by this pseudo Kickstarter, and wonder why Kickstarter turned them down in the first place.
I imagine Kickstarter turned them down because of potential liability if something goes wrong. Replacing food with chemicals makes sense to scientists and engineers, but I imagine this has the potential to be lawsuit-heavy for the average people out there (my back aches, must be the Soylent).
Edit: specifically, these two guidelines:
- Projects cannot offer financial, medical, or health advice.
- No tobacco, drugs, and drug paraphernalia; energy food and drinks; or nutritional supplements.
Kickstarter is for creative projects with a finite ending point. For example, you can't launch a website and raise funds on Kickstarter so you can pay engineers -- it needs to be a concrete project, not "I want to start a company." The same is true for Soylent, it isn't framed as a project.
I've been following the Soylent articles since they were posted and have been pretty interested in it. Definitely going to have to give thought to backing this.
It's a diet shake where the seller goes "you know what, fuck it, I don't recommend that you eat a balanced diet, and I do recommend you replace all your meals with this shake"
Most diet shakes aren't marketed as being fully nutritious. This has all the vitamins your body craves; as in I think you could eat this forever with no side effects, but that (to my knowledge) has never been tested with diet drinks (because they can claim that it's your responsibility to get the right nutrients).
So, it's a diet shake where the company is liable?
Man, i'm dying to be able to live on shakes (I already do, protein shakes and soluble fiber when i'm out of time) but claiming you can go on and on on just one food source for long periods of time without extensive testing is just irresponsible.
>> claiming you can go on and on on just one food source for long periods of time without extensive testing is just irresponsible.
How can pets tolerate eating the same food for a long period of time? Most cat and dog owners get one brand of food for their pet and stick with it for years at a time.
Most pet food is made by a few manufacturers. They have a lot of labs testing and refining different recipes.
There are foods for fat pets; foods to clean teeth; food for kidney health.
Pet foods have considerable number of patents. Talk to British people about dog excrement, and there are people of a certain age who remember dog poo being white and furry. People want a food that produces a nice firm stool, that's easy to clean up. Anything too loose and they think the pet is ill (even if it isn't).
There's a lot of money in pet food.
Notice, also, that pet food is often a mix of biscuits and meat, or just meat, or just biscuits. These are solid foods. Water is extra. No-one so far has taken the nutrients a pet needs and blended these into a glop.
Thanks for pointing out some of the finer details on pet food, very informative.
Still, my basic point still stands, that our pets do just fine on essentially a single source of food. Why would it matter if it was blended into a glop? My cat has food allergies so he's been fed a single high-quality hypoallergenic food for over 3 years now. It stopped his excessive itching, made his fur softer, and he generally shows all signs of being very healthy according to the vet. I'm sure all the lab research contributed to the cat food's effectiveness and it would be great to see the same happen with Soylent.
You vastly overestimate the quality control, safety testing, and labelling requirements of pet foods. Pet food does not need to be certified, or pass any tests to be sold. Pet food is labelled according to AAFCO guidelines, which merely specifies how much protein/fat/calcium/phosphorous and a few other things are required. That's it. Those pet foods for fat dogs and old dogs and young dogs and kidney health and shiney coat and furballs and clean teeth are just ordinary pet food. They do not need to be different in any way. The manufacturer can literally put the exact same food into all of those bags, and none of the claims on them need to be verifiable.
>Talk to British people about dog excrement, and there are people of a certain age who remember dog poo being white and furry
That is because they remember dogs eating meat. Now dogs eat corn. There is no patent on dog food that makes white poop.
>Notice, also, that pet food is often a mix of biscuits and meat, or just meat, or just biscuits
This is for the benefit of marketing the product to people, it has nothing to do with nutrition.
It probably isn't much different--but after reading about Soylent, I bought a few six-packs of Ensure just to try out the "don't feel like cooking/eating and would ordinarily eat something bad for you? drink a meal!" concept. I ended up crashing--hard--a few hours after my "breakfast." It was absurdly sugary. Basically it felt like marketing had demanded a product that "tasted good," so the ingredients list got a giant extra helping of sugar. If Soylent were just a version of Ensure that is focused on a sane balance of calories between carbs, fat, and protein, I'd personally be very happy with it.
it seems to just be a implementation of Selfstarter with a backend to process payments, but at the same time they boast "Free to use"... how can a payment processing be free?
It uses Crowdtilt to process payments, which takes 2.5%. Although the wording of the statement isn't crystal clear; they may charge the people wishing to contribute an extra 2.5%? Regardless, 2.5% gets skimmed off for payment processing.
I got curious about this statement: 2 million people are killed annually by smoke inhalation from indoor cooking stoves alone. This is just wrong enough to be misleading, since that figure actually includes heating, not just cooking. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs292/en/ So soylent wouldn't help in the cases where indoor pollution is caused by heating.
Yes, a claim that 0.2% of the world population dies every year from their own stoves caught my attention. The WHO report is striking to me, because that's a lot of people dying from causes they don't understand and don't see coming.
It's a pretty important fact. If the creator is trying to justify the adoption of Soylent as a meal replacement by using this fact (obviously not by itself) then they need to be careful to use facts clearly. The phrasing in the pitch blames 2 million deaths upon indoor cooking, which is inaccurate.
Either they deliberately misreported something; in which case they're lying while trying to raise money.
Or they made a mistake. And if they get something this simple wrong why should I trust them when they're making something that I'm supposed to be able to live on?
PBS and Science Magazine allegedly got some facts wrong. Regardless, the WHO is talking about three billion indoor fires in primitive homes.
In most of these cases, there is no distinction between a "cooking stove" and "heating stove" and whether these families require heating year round or not, cooking is not a seasonal activity.
Splitting hairs on this point is dumb, though. The point of citing it at all is to illustrate how big they are thinking. They want to solve the entire world's food problem. Isn't that scale of vision why we're all here?
Soylent is not going to reduce the death toll from indoor stoves if those people have to continue using their stoves to stay warm (even if not also to cook). To make grandiose claims is to risk undermining legitimate ones.
> They want to solve the entire world's food problem. Isn't that scale of vision why we're all here?
That's an amazing vision. Soylent shows little to no understanding of the actual problems of food security. There doesn't appear to be any research into the causes of food scarcity, or who is affected by food scarcity, or what a sensible solution would be.
Soylent glop doesn't seem to do anything to increase local independence. Where food could be grown and sold locally now people are importing a bunch of stuff from elsewhere.
The concept of Soylent is orthogonal to the slow food movement, but it isn't incompatible with local production by definition.
None of your objections make any real sense. This is an early prototype of balanced-diet-in-a-pill, but because they haven't solved the problem of clean water across the globe, they're the cynical ones?
I was mostly commenting on the state of commenting on hackernews.
Somebody comes out with an idea to drastically transform the way that we consume food + the top comment, at the time, was about one small detail in his vid.
> Somebody comes out with an idea to drastically transform the way that we consume food
No. Liquid feed has existed for a long time. You can walk to a shop and buy it. There's a small convenience store across the road from me selling it next to coca cola and pepsi.
We are polite to people who are sincere, even if they are foolish and ignorant. We are rude to people who are engaged in blatantly dangerous scamming.
>Soylent is perfectly balanced and optimized for your body and lifestyle, meaning it automatically puts you at an optimal weight, makes you feel full, and improves your focus and cognition.
Citation needed. I'm a big fan of n=1, but making these kinds of claims supported by anecdote and then asking for money based on those claims is ridiculous.
It's a pity no one on the team has any experience in a relevant field, and the "Is it safe?" answer is absurd. You could say the same thing to deem cigarettes safe.
More than a nutritionist, they probably need a ten year double-blind study. "We tried it on ourselves for a few months" isn't long enough for some deficiencies to present themselves, lacks a control, and both the investigators and the test subjects are aware of what they're taking in.
YM dietitian. A dietitian is someone with the relevant educational background, at least in the US. (The title of "nutritionist", in contrast, has no legal requirements, so they are perfectly free to call themselves nutritionists if they want to.)
I'm glad such eccentric projects are pursued – they're how progress happens – but it's still the case that...
(a) Both the 1973 Charlton Heston movie and mixed, some-negative health connotations of the word 'soy' make the chosen name for the product problematic.
(b) The argument for its safety – "We have been testing Soylent on ourselves for several months and the data shows it to have a positive nutritional benefit" – creates little confidence compared to thousands of years of alternate practice, and strong evidence the human system needs some variety/chaos for optimal health/resilience.
Some people said that it was only a matter of time before this person started charging money for this crank product, and I guess this proves them right.
He's making a number of health claims on that page. I'm curious about the legality of doing so; it's not legal in the UK unless he meets some pretty strict criteria.
> If not for this waste there would be plenty of food to adequately nourish everyone alive.
Waste food is a serious problem and something needs to be done. I'm not sure there's a connection between food waste and world hunger.
> 2 million people are killed annually by smoke inhalation from indoor cooking stoves alone
This could be an interesting problem. Why do people use really inefficient dirty open fires to cook? Why aren't they using better stoves? It's not as if a stove requires huge amounts of resources.
"Unfortunately due to regulatory constraints, our initial runs of Soylent will be available within the United States only. We are diligently working to provide it worldwide as soon as possible."
So indeed the UK won't be seeing this sold (legally) anytime soon.
That said, I don't think it's really a case of whether or not Soylent is safe. Even if they have FDA approval, and produce Soylent under the strictest conditions of food safety, the real problem is their idea behind Soylent's use -- that it can replace a balanced diet. I'm sure it's safe to have it occasionally, if even a few portions of it everyday. But to virtually replace your diet? That's a bold claim, and with dangerous consequences at that.
Are the people that die from smoke inhalation going to buy and feed themselves on Solyent in the future? That is an interesting logistical problem, and if so, what would that logistical footprint mean for the environment? I think these arguments are ridiculous, no matter how good it is, unless it is opened, locally produced food will always be the best choice, environment-wise.
Yeah really. If that figure is incorrect, building a better cook stove would be an excellent place to apply some engineering know-how. Reinventing food is less so.
Rob Rhinehart said he would be doing a kickstarter a long time ago. This isn't news, it's a followup to what he promised. Why is this horrible/end-of-the-world? I don't have the time or knowledge to safely track down and mix the materials myself, I will happily pay a premium for someone else to do so.
Why do people use really inefficient dirty open fires to cook? Why aren't they using better stoves? It's not as if a stove requires huge amounts of resources.
Or better still, why not just let them eat cake? Then they won't need stoves or fires at all! Those poor people out in third-world countries sure are silly....
Sarcasm aside, if someone can't afford a better stove they're not going to be able to afford Soylent, so it's a pretty ridiculous benefit to cite in the first place.
The reason for the stoves and kerosene lighting is that there is little other energy available. And its not cheap. There are startups working on funding solar panels which can provide electricity cleanly by funding the capital costs.
Rather more worthwhile than some bullshit diet for Americans who can't cook.
But for someone trying to hack nutrition this way, you would think they would open the ingredients, or at least offer research sources.
Knowing the contents of Soylent isn't going to stop anyone from buying it (convenience), but it would allow people to understand some of these bold claims.
I'm actually really pissed off at this product -- as with many, I've had both high hopes and reservations since the start of this whole ordeal.
With me being a college student with a VERY limited budget I get very little nutrition that's needed for my body to operate normally. I was so turned on to this product because it was initially advertised to cost the creator between $50 and $100 per month. Now, all of a sudden it's going to cost me $230 just to get started.
It's starting to sound more and more like a scam; I'm pretty livid.
Yeah I remembered he claimed to be able to control the monthly cost for around $103 and I got pretty excited over that. Now I'm disappointed to see the price rose to $230. I guess it is time to really find out where my own mix went wrong: I feel the irresistible urge to eat a ton a few days after I'm on my own mix.
I'm not sure that the cost of a month's supply on this campaign is necessarily what it will ultimately cost in full production. The prices listed here, I assume, are what they think they need to charge to reach their 100k goal to enter mass production (based on how many people they expect will support the campaign). Ultimately they have a lot more costs than just the price of the ingredients, and their first run is likely to be more expensive than subsequent runs.
Exactly. If it really cost $65/week or whatever the Kickstarter is charging, why would they bother doing it? The whole point is apparently to raise funds to cover all the startup costs - of course you are paying more than the marginal cost of Soylent.
I remember when I first read the creator's blog post and how little it costs to make. Now I come and see it costs about the same amount it costs me to purchase food for a week.
I'm a college student -- I live off of ramen noodles, and whatever I can steal at my parents house. $230 per month simply isn't in my budget. I was excited because ramen isn't healthy, in fact I've gained about 30-40lbs because it's basically all I eat; and it's becoming a serious health issue.
as someone who has been in your situation, ramen is actually really expensive, both in terms of $/cooked oz and $/nutrition.
I highly recommend you switch to brown rice, wheat pasta, beans, produce, and cheap cuts of meat. Add in a slow cooker if you don't have much time.
Oh, and as for this soylent product, I would run screaming away. I only read his recipe up to the carbs section, and the fact that he thinks all carbs are the same because they end up as ATP is mind-boggling. It's as if he isn't aware of the huge problem with HFCS. Any biochem undergrad can tell you about the incredible complexity of the feedback and regulatory mechanisms of the body; to focus only on the end product of a mechanism is ignorant at best.
> $230 is cheaper than grocery shopping for a month for a lot of people too.
Put probably not cheaper than grocery shopping for a month for one person, unless that person has particular food tastes that Soylent isn't going to address.
Show me a shopping list that provides 100% RDI of all vitamins and minerals (without dangerous excesses of any of them), a reasonable balance of protein, fat and carbs, sufficient omega3s, and 2000 Kcal/day. You don't even need to worry about making actual meals out of this random assortment of ingredients, just the ingredients themselves. I do not believe you can do it for $230/month.
spend the remaining ~3/day on whatever you feel like. suggestions include: pasta and sauce at ~1 a meal.
whole fat chocolate milk at about ~2 a day.
a pint of olive oil a day.
a case of ramen a day.
a pint of ben and jerry's (there's 2000 kcal by itself).
Prices sourced from an H.E.B. supermarket in Austin Tx.
Oh, also, I've been living on less than 3$ of food a day for the last year, so this isn't exactly theoretical. 230 per person per month would the height of luxury for me.
Spent one summer living off of ramen, eggs, carrots, and celery. It's like tenbux for a week of food, and can be filling--poaching an egg into the ramen with a sliced up carrot and celery stalk is where it's at.
It was always pretty clear that the early costs represented ingredients only, and the ingredients themselves have changed over time. There's also processing, containers, shipping, etc. when you're interested in someone making it for you.
The ingredients list is published and available, there's even a spreadsheet up with online locations where you can buy everything.
I can understand being dissatisfied about cost - but it was never claimed that you could receive this delivered to your door for $100/mo.
Poor Uni student here, I spend ~$2.75/day on Soylent Orange. Blood work after 8 months is peachy. Of course I still buy food, but my overall food bill is way lower than anyone I know.
I don't think it's really cheaper than making your own food. If you buy it for a month and you eat it three times a day, it ends up being about $2.5 per meal, or $7.5 a day. My breakfast costs me $.5 to $1, so that leave $3.5 per meal. It's probably what I average already, if not less. I think I spend about $100 maximum on groceries per week for my girlfriend and me, and that includes extras like an occasional bottle of wine.
I think I remember him saying that the recipe was "open source", maybe you could just make it yourself to save.
I can see his saving time argument though. Although there are days I gladly spent an hour or more in my kitchen, some days when I'm busy or lazy I would consider it.
Sidenote - calling this "corporation", I don't know if it's a joke or just poor marketing.
I don't understand how it ever can be cheaper than making food from raw ingredients. This powder they are selling are a mixture of processed ingredients, that must have originally been extracted from something from something harvested, right? It is a more complicated process to make it, compared with letting things grow in the sun mostly by themselves, and then harvesting.
I can't help but feel that this is such an 'engineers' solution to something that isn't really a problem - whilst I agree that a cheap, reliable and efficient way to feed a lot of people is something that the world is sorely in need of, I can't understand why someone would opt for this through choice and not necessity.
Which is nothing more than a failure of my imagination, of course, and I'm not seriously suggesting that anyone who does is defective in any way, but I feel like most of life's greatest pleasures come directly from the preparation and consumption of food. To want to get rid of these pleasures in the name of efficiency is a strange argument to my mind.
I'm 100% behind the vat grown meat brigade on this one.
Agreed. I'm a pretty good cook, but I can't stand doing it upwards of 99% of the time. I appreciate the shit out of a good meal, but I appreciate a mediocre meal that took me 0 effort to acquire much, much more than even the best meal that took me so much as 1 effort to acquire. Pour water into container and shake is about as low effort as I can imagine for a nutritionally complete meal, and if I die from liver failure after a month then I just wasn't meant to be.
Although some of the lofty stated goals of this project seem commendable, this is one of the worst ideas I have heard in a long time. I can't tell if it's a joke, but I hope that it is.
Would be nice if you put nutrition facts on the campaign page. I wouldn't buy without seeing those. Here is what I found ("What's In Soylent?"): http://robrhinehart.com/?p=424
The macronutrient breakdown based on calories per gram is 50% carbs, 13% protein, 37% fat, if I'm not mistaken. I'd rather have a bit more protein and a bit less fat, personally.
They'll also want to get their production facility cGMP certified, which is going to substantially raise short term prices in addition to those associated with FDA labeling procedures.
You might "rather" have more protein and less fat but you have no clue if that is what you need. If they market the product as a dietary supplement, then they will not have to list nutrition facts and will be able to say this is a "Proprietary Blend". This is a very common practice among supplement companies and can be witnessed by going to your local GNC.
Protein shakes and meal replacements almost always show the amount of protein/fat/carbs. Usually they reserve these "secretive" proprietary blends for creatine, NO3, caffeine, and similar muscle-building or preworkout supplements. I see what you're getting at it, and I agree they might not have to list it, I just think it would be nice to know and perhaps would increase trust.
I'm in the same camp as the author, saying that people overestimate the harm of fat. I don't think I need 56 grams of fat in a serving of soylent, though. Let's assume I want to maintain my bodyweight and need about 2500-3000 calories to do so given the amount I exercise. Two servings of soylent will give me 1600 calories from carbs, 400 calories from protein, and 1008 calories from fat. Maybe that's fine, but maybe it's not ideal. I guess I'd like to know. I think it's a stretch to say I have no clue what I need. Maybe I don't know what I need to survive, in terms of a bare minimum, but I know what I need to maintain my weight in terms of calories.
Yes, because a handful of smiley tech nerd kids know nutrition better than professional researchers with decades of experience, backed by hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
Why not? Handfuls of smiley tech nerd kids think they know the web better than professional corporations with decades of experience, and are proven right all of the time.
They study, they tell us what they find, they study more, and tell us new information, and keep going, getting better and more refined as they progress. More researchers test the claims, and prove it one way or another. If this isn't good enough for you, then at what point would information ever be good enough for you? Do you expect a time when knowledge is complete and set?
You prefer the ideas of non researchers, people with no foundation in the subject or scientific methods? You prefer their advice? You might as well take your scientific facts from a bloke in a bar.
Hey, no need for scientific rigor here when you're crowdfunded and are operating a startup. Move fast and break things, right?
In all seriousness, kudos to these kids and their ambitions. However, the software model of iterating fast doesn't always translate to the physical world, especially when it comes to items ingested by human beings.
It's one thing to "pivot" on your Instagram clone, but taking some experimental goop that hasn't been rigorously tested with good unbiased science (not to mention with a sample size larger than one 24-year old) and deciding to market it is another thing--especially when none of your "team" are nutritionists by trade. There's a reason we have the FDA. I get that this is the "startup culture", but let's take a moment to realize the physical world doesn't allow us to recompile and try again very easily.
Do they really expect to market this without even listing whats in that thing? And why does not a single person in their team have any credentials in the area whatsoever?
Limited market appeal (folks who eat to live vs live to eat) and it lacks the credibility of a clinical study done under the supervision of folks who have the experience to evaluate the results.
So in that way it is simply another "look, eating this probably won't kill you, at least not quickly." product. There are many of these introduced and produced every year.
That said, to the extent that this guy can get traction for his effectively artificial food, the big food companies will watch it and talk about it. If there is something to it they might add their own toe in the water, or not. Most recently they have been hammered pretty publicly about how their manufactured food products aren't really much food (see "In Defense of Food" as an example of the narrative)
In the end though, it's just food. I could launch a kickstarter campaign that sold veggie shakes and claim it makes people feel healthier when they drink them and it would be no more harmful than this campaign.
Nowhere do they recommend that you replace every single meal with Soylent and the creator stated many times throughout his many blog posts that he continued to eat normal meals whenever he felt like eating normal meals. This is in contrast to something like the movie Fat Sick and Nearly Dead (http://www.fatsickandnearlydead.com/) which actually does recommend drinking veggie shakes exclusively for every meal for 90 days.
That to me doesn't sound like a recommendation to actually replace every single meal for that month. Rather, it's a unit of measurement that provides better context than simply giving the number of kilograms of powder you'll be receiving. Even so, I don't think it would be harmful to do it for an entire month anyways, and I doubt very many people will be that hardcore about it. It will work perfectly as an occasional meal replacement for busy geeks on the go. Attacking the extreme case is attacking the straw man, IMO.
Perhaps. There seems to be a lot of people who seem to have thought what I thought, though. Maybe it would be better if they gave an all-out disclaimer saying that, "no, Soylent cannot be considered as a replacement for your balanced diet"?
From his blog, he really did seem to push the idea of making Soylent his only food -- IIRC he felt like that the traditional idea of eating from a lot of different sources was stressful (I guess the decision of what to eat, etc, was stressful). His blog seems to be down for me right now, though, so I can't confirm that.
Yeah, I agree they should state that. He did mention a few times that he eats normal meals when he wants to, but even at that it was only a few times a week. If I buy the stuff I'm likely to only replace my breakfasts and lunches and continue having dinner with my family.
This is not a veggie shake though. I'm pretty sure most people who eat this would eat this in conjunction with other foods, but the few that really do try to eat Soylent alone, and for long periods of time, which is exactly the idea they're pushing, that may be harmful.
True, and perhaps one of the classic examples of a product like this is "Instant Breakfast" which claims to be the equivalent of breakfast but something you can prepare and eat quickly.
There are markets for this kind of stuff though, like military foodstocks (MREs) or disaster supplies if there is a decent shelf life. But those products have some interesting (at least to me) testing cycles they have gone through.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 357 ms ] threadIf you decide you don't like soylent there are a bunch of other products from other more mainstream manufacturers.
Fortisip and Ensure are the two brands I'm most familiar with, but there are others. Fortisip do wide range of different style products (shake, juice, yoghurt, and 'savory'.) But it's an acquired taste.
I'm not sure why they have two trailing slashes. (https://www.nutricia.co.uk/fortisip//)
(http://ensure.com/)
Sure, it's marketed as having a low glycemic index — but the GI of chocolate cake and ice cream is even lower...
Edit: specifically, these two guidelines:
- Projects cannot offer financial, medical, or health advice.
- No tobacco, drugs, and drug paraphernalia; energy food and drinks; or nutritional supplements.
http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.soylent.me
Man, i'm dying to be able to live on shakes (I already do, protein shakes and soluble fiber when i'm out of time) but claiming you can go on and on on just one food source for long periods of time without extensive testing is just irresponsible.
How can pets tolerate eating the same food for a long period of time? Most cat and dog owners get one brand of food for their pet and stick with it for years at a time.
Are our digestive systems really that different?
There are foods for fat pets; foods to clean teeth; food for kidney health.
Pet foods have considerable number of patents. Talk to British people about dog excrement, and there are people of a certain age who remember dog poo being white and furry. People want a food that produces a nice firm stool, that's easy to clean up. Anything too loose and they think the pet is ill (even if it isn't).
There's a lot of money in pet food.
Notice, also, that pet food is often a mix of biscuits and meat, or just meat, or just biscuits. These are solid foods. Water is extra. No-one so far has taken the nutrients a pet needs and blended these into a glop.
Still, my basic point still stands, that our pets do just fine on essentially a single source of food. Why would it matter if it was blended into a glop? My cat has food allergies so he's been fed a single high-quality hypoallergenic food for over 3 years now. It stopped his excessive itching, made his fur softer, and he generally shows all signs of being very healthy according to the vet. I'm sure all the lab research contributed to the cat food's effectiveness and it would be great to see the same happen with Soylent.
>Talk to British people about dog excrement, and there are people of a certain age who remember dog poo being white and furry
That is because they remember dogs eating meat. Now dogs eat corn. There is no patent on dog food that makes white poop.
>Notice, also, that pet food is often a mix of biscuits and meat, or just meat, or just biscuits
This is for the benefit of marketing the product to people, it has nothing to do with nutrition.
it seems to just be a implementation of Selfstarter with a backend to process payments, but at the same time they boast "Free to use"... how can a payment processing be free?
https://www.crowdtilt.com/learn/fees
Either they deliberately misreported something; in which case they're lying while trying to raise money.
Or they made a mistake. And if they get something this simple wrong why should I trust them when they're making something that I'm supposed to be able to live on?
In most of these cases, there is no distinction between a "cooking stove" and "heating stove" and whether these families require heating year round or not, cooking is not a seasonal activity.
Splitting hairs on this point is dumb, though. The point of citing it at all is to illustrate how big they are thinking. They want to solve the entire world's food problem. Isn't that scale of vision why we're all here?
That's an amazing vision. Soylent shows little to no understanding of the actual problems of food security. There doesn't appear to be any research into the causes of food scarcity, or who is affected by food scarcity, or what a sensible solution would be.
Soylent glop doesn't seem to do anything to increase local independence. Where food could be grown and sold locally now people are importing a bunch of stuff from elsewhere.
Here are some people in Mogadishu selling food. (http://www.irinnews.org/Photo/Details/201207161308270312/Veg...)
How much Soylent does this child need? (http://pinterest.com/pin/278519558175219781/)
How do you get Soylent to the Democratic Republic of Congo?
What do you do when people don't have clean water?
Soylent have made a strong link between food waste and world hunger. They claim that waste here causes hunger there. That's clearly, blatantly, wrong.
I'm all for big ideas and thinking big, but so far this is either a cynical scam or brutally ignorant.
The concept of Soylent is orthogonal to the slow food movement, but it isn't incompatible with local production by definition.
None of your objections make any real sense. This is an early prototype of balanced-diet-in-a-pill, but because they haven't solved the problem of clean water across the globe, they're the cynical ones?
Somebody comes out with an idea to drastically transform the way that we consume food + the top comment, at the time, was about one small detail in his vid.
Is it wrong to ridicule that kind of comment?
No. Liquid feed has existed for a long time. You can walk to a shop and buy it. There's a small convenience store across the road from me selling it next to coca cola and pepsi.
We are polite to people who are sincere, even if they are foolish and ignorant. We are rude to people who are engaged in blatantly dangerous scamming.
Citation needed. I'm a big fan of n=1, but making these kinds of claims supported by anecdote and then asking for money based on those claims is ridiculous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breatharianism
(a) Both the 1973 Charlton Heston movie and mixed, some-negative health connotations of the word 'soy' make the chosen name for the product problematic.
(b) The argument for its safety – "We have been testing Soylent on ourselves for several months and the data shows it to have a positive nutritional benefit" – creates little confidence compared to thousands of years of alternate practice, and strong evidence the human system needs some variety/chaos for optimal health/resilience.
He's making a number of health claims on that page. I'm curious about the legality of doing so; it's not legal in the UK unless he meets some pretty strict criteria.
> If not for this waste there would be plenty of food to adequately nourish everyone alive.
Waste food is a serious problem and something needs to be done. I'm not sure there's a connection between food waste and world hunger.
> 2 million people are killed annually by smoke inhalation from indoor cooking stoves alone
This could be an interesting problem. Why do people use really inefficient dirty open fires to cook? Why aren't they using better stoves? It's not as if a stove requires huge amounts of resources.
"Unfortunately due to regulatory constraints, our initial runs of Soylent will be available within the United States only. We are diligently working to provide it worldwide as soon as possible."
So indeed the UK won't be seeing this sold (legally) anytime soon.
That said, I don't think it's really a case of whether or not Soylent is safe. Even if they have FDA approval, and produce Soylent under the strictest conditions of food safety, the real problem is their idea behind Soylent's use -- that it can replace a balanced diet. I'm sure it's safe to have it occasionally, if even a few portions of it everyday. But to virtually replace your diet? That's a bold claim, and with dangerous consequences at that.
Or better still, why not just let them eat cake? Then they won't need stoves or fires at all! Those poor people out in third-world countries sure are silly....
Sarcasm aside, if someone can't afford a better stove they're not going to be able to afford Soylent, so it's a pretty ridiculous benefit to cite in the first place.
Rather more worthwhile than some bullshit diet for Americans who can't cook.
Like he explicitly said he was going to do from the start? Man, those people must be clairvoyant.
But for someone trying to hack nutrition this way, you would think they would open the ingredients, or at least offer research sources.
Knowing the contents of Soylent isn't going to stop anyone from buying it (convenience), but it would allow people to understand some of these bold claims.
With me being a college student with a VERY limited budget I get very little nutrition that's needed for my body to operate normally. I was so turned on to this product because it was initially advertised to cost the creator between $50 and $100 per month. Now, all of a sudden it's going to cost me $230 just to get started.
It's starting to sound more and more like a scam; I'm pretty livid.
I remember when I first read the creator's blog post and how little it costs to make. Now I come and see it costs about the same amount it costs me to purchase food for a week.
I highly recommend you switch to brown rice, wheat pasta, beans, produce, and cheap cuts of meat. Add in a slow cooker if you don't have much time.
Oh, and as for this soylent product, I would run screaming away. I only read his recipe up to the carbs section, and the fact that he thinks all carbs are the same because they end up as ATP is mind-boggling. It's as if he isn't aware of the huge problem with HFCS. Any biochem undergrad can tell you about the incredible complexity of the feedback and regulatory mechanisms of the body; to focus only on the end product of a mechanism is ignorant at best.
Put probably not cheaper than grocery shopping for a month for one person, unless that person has particular food tastes that Soylent isn't going to address.
Prices sourced from an H.E.B. supermarket in Austin Tx. Oh, also, I've been living on less than 3$ of food a day for the last year, so this isn't exactly theoretical. 230 per person per month would the height of luxury for me.
The ingredients list is published and available, there's even a spreadsheet up with online locations where you can buy everything.
I can understand being dissatisfied about cost - but it was never claimed that you could receive this delivered to your door for $100/mo.
I'm not certain who's maintaining or how up to date this is; but here is the one I'd previously seen. There may be better data sources around.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjA38cUd4BZBdGZ...
I think I remember him saying that the recipe was "open source", maybe you could just make it yourself to save.
I can see his saving time argument though. Although there are days I gladly spent an hour or more in my kitchen, some days when I'm busy or lazy I would consider it.
Sidenote - calling this "corporation", I don't know if it's a joke or just poor marketing.
Which is nothing more than a failure of my imagination, of course, and I'm not seriously suggesting that anyone who does is defective in any way, but I feel like most of life's greatest pleasures come directly from the preparation and consumption of food. To want to get rid of these pleasures in the name of efficiency is a strange argument to my mind.
I'm 100% behind the vat grown meat brigade on this one.
The macronutrient breakdown based on calories per gram is 50% carbs, 13% protein, 37% fat, if I'm not mistaken. I'd rather have a bit more protein and a bit less fat, personally.
http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Food/GuidanceRegulation/UCM2654...
I'm in the same camp as the author, saying that people overestimate the harm of fat. I don't think I need 56 grams of fat in a serving of soylent, though. Let's assume I want to maintain my bodyweight and need about 2500-3000 calories to do so given the amount I exercise. Two servings of soylent will give me 1600 calories from carbs, 400 calories from protein, and 1008 calories from fat. Maybe that's fine, but maybe it's not ideal. I guess I'd like to know. I think it's a stretch to say I have no clue what I need. Maybe I don't know what I need to survive, in terms of a bare minimum, but I know what I need to maintain my weight in terms of calories.
They study, they tell us what they find, they study more, and tell us new information, and keep going, getting better and more refined as they progress. More researchers test the claims, and prove it one way or another. If this isn't good enough for you, then at what point would information ever be good enough for you? Do you expect a time when knowledge is complete and set?
You prefer the ideas of non researchers, people with no foundation in the subject or scientific methods? You prefer their advice? You might as well take your scientific facts from a bloke in a bar.
In all seriousness, kudos to these kids and their ambitions. However, the software model of iterating fast doesn't always translate to the physical world, especially when it comes to items ingested by human beings.
It's one thing to "pivot" on your Instagram clone, but taking some experimental goop that hasn't been rigorously tested with good unbiased science (not to mention with a sample size larger than one 24-year old) and deciding to market it is another thing--especially when none of your "team" are nutritionists by trade. There's a reason we have the FDA. I get that this is the "startup culture", but let's take a moment to realize the physical world doesn't allow us to recompile and try again very easily.
So in that way it is simply another "look, eating this probably won't kill you, at least not quickly." product. There are many of these introduced and produced every year.
That said, to the extent that this guy can get traction for his effectively artificial food, the big food companies will watch it and talk about it. If there is something to it they might add their own toe in the water, or not. Most recently they have been hammered pretty publicly about how their manufactured food products aren't really much food (see "In Defense of Food" as an example of the narrative)
"One Month's Supply of Soylent We'll ship enough Soylent to fully replace one month's worth of meals. Shipping included."
From his blog, he really did seem to push the idea of making Soylent his only food -- IIRC he felt like that the traditional idea of eating from a lot of different sources was stressful (I guess the decision of what to eat, etc, was stressful). His blog seems to be down for me right now, though, so I can't confirm that.
There are markets for this kind of stuff though, like military foodstocks (MREs) or disaster supplies if there is a decent shelf life. But those products have some interesting (at least to me) testing cycles they have gone through.
If that's how it was marketed most people would have much less problem with it.
But when it's claiming to regulate cholesterol and etc, well, that's just sleazy.
Are we that rare?