Leaving aside the ongoing discussions about Soylent itself as a foodstuff, when was the last time you saw food of any kind with a version number and a changelog? I'd love to see more of that in the market.
Seems unlikely, especially given the current state of the food industrial complex in the US. Plus, even a not-too-evil company would end up with
"$brand cereals 2.1.3.201411010: uses cheaper corn from a new producer, coloring of the red ones comes from a different horrible thing than the last one."
It was started out as a lifestyle hack in order to save time and money on cooking and eating (something that many busy people don't want to worry about ALL the time, including tech folks).
They also crowdfunded millions of dollars worth of orders, another aspect of the tech industry that gets people on Hacker News interested.
Personally, as someone who is very into fitness, I've been looking for something like this that is healthy compared to all the meal replacements in the store (which are not very healthy in big doses for a variety of reasons and aren't neutral-tasting enough to consistently eat). I've enjoyed my Soylent experience a lot despite not loving the ingredient mix 100%.
> Third, it is one of the foremost examples of hacking diet.
> Fourth, the HN audience is a key audience of early adopting efficiency seekers.
There is nothing new about Soylent, apart from the unethical crowd-funding[1] and easy access to the public.
Liquid total meal replacements are common and have existed for a log time and are available from Amazon. They don't always push the total replacement aspect because lawyers and I guess because they never expected anyone to want to do so, but people live off existing products and have done so for years.
[1] "puts you in perfect health" and other unethical claims which seem to have been quietly dropped.
That is the main thing that is quite new. And also that extended meal replacement has not typically been marketed to this audience. Both of these are pretty huge, IMO.
> All shipments leaving our facilities now contain the updated formula.
I just ordered another 30 day supply last week. I've not yet received a shipping notice for that order. So I am hoping that it will be 1.2 rather than 1.1. I wasn't too fond of the idea of the added enzymes in 1.1.
And, while I'm not vegan, it sounds like the oil blend change will make things simpler on their end by no longer needing a separate sku and/or packaging process to eliminate the fish oil blend for vegans.
Great and all, but I really wish they'd work on making it available outside of the US, as well. I'd love to be able to order some up in Canada, and have three other friends looking to try it.
This is great, the only problem is all of those Amazon links next to the ingredients are for amazon.com, food products aren't available on amazon.ca. It's impossible to buy all of those with one click in Canada. I'd have to hunt down Canadian shipping sites or visit 3 different grocery stores to find most of those.
>The amount of vitamins are dangerously higher than 100% recommended daily intake
No they are not. Your comment link doesn't work, but the only comments I saw complaining about excessive micronutrients were baseless fearmongering. None of the micronutrients are even close to the TUL. All of the very high ones there are B complex vitamins that simply do not have an upper limit on intake. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin
If you sort the comments by votes, it's #2, here is a quote:
> subjects taking vitamin A supplements were more likely to die from lung cancer than subjects taking a placebo. A third trial, SELECT, found that dietary supplementation with vitamin E (400 IU/d of all rac-α-tocopheryl acetate) in healthy men significantly increased their risk of prostate cancer. When I see recipes that contain micronutrient levels that are orders of magnitude higher than the recommended daily intake"
> This recipe has off-the-charts values for some nutrients, including 3000% DRI of thiamin, 2483% DRI of riboflavin, and 2583% DRI vitamin B6. Here’s a fun quote from the NIH office of dietary supplements (link below): “taking high levels of vitamin B6 from supplements for a year or longer can cause severe nerve damage, leading people to lose control of their bodily movements.”
Yes, that's the one I thought you meant. It is exactly what I described. 3000% of those water soluable B vitamins is perfectly fine, and people routinely get that in their diets already. There is no upper limit on them, excess is simply passed.
His vitamin A study is completely irrelevant. Those studies are people taking 100 times the daily intake, which is well above the TUL. That is literally studies saying "if we poison people they get sick". 2.2x the daily intake is not 100x.
B6 is still way below the TUL, which is set at 10% of the amount that has been shown to cause damage. You would need to eat 30 times what this provides to be at risk. As I said, that is all fearmongering nonsense.
I had to send an email to info@soylent.me to get them to send me my first order. It arrived today. They said it was delayed because of a "shipping error"
This happened when I ordered a refill for my 1.0, I actually wanted to try out the 1.1, if you're in the bay area, I'll swap you a week of 1.2 when I get it :)
This is a bummer. I did the original Kickstarter run, so when I reorder it's fulfilled within a week. I'd happily have my orders delayed longer than that (a few weeks?) if it helped others get a chance to try out Soylent.
Very happy to see that Soylent will now be free of animal products.
I had no idea that you could produce oil rich in Omega-3 fatty acids from algae. And looking it up lead me to learn that you can also product more traditional fuels from algae as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel
I formerly worked for a company where our primary line of business was producing Omega-3s from algae (nannochloropsis). Our company didn't work out (for unrelated reasons), but the economics and realities regarding the global fish stock ensure that a non-insignificant portion of Omega-3s/7s will come from algae in the not-too-distant future!
For those who do care though, definitely examine the origin of your algae products. Most of the spirulina / haematococcus (for astaxanthin) / nannochloropsis by volume is grown in rather disgusting conditions in China and India. The US, Japan, and European products are much cleaner but are often GMO if that kind of thing matters to you.
I am not a Soylent fan but I do like this food-versioning idea. What if all consumer food products were required to have versions numbers and a change log to detail out modifications?
Oreos version 2.3: Reduced count from 36 to 34. Increased price by 15 cents.
Pepsi version 3.0: Swapped sugar for high-fructose corn syrup.
GitHub could be leveraged to do this so easily and it would make for an awesome repo. Each product could get it's own file allowing easy tracking of revisions, PR and issue tracking. A standardised file naming convention and formatting are all that's needed to get started.
EDIT:
There is also DIY Soylent [1] with some popular recipes, detailed nutritional information and versioning of each formula. People Chow v3.0.1 [2] seems to be one of the favourite recipes.
> GitHub could be leveraged to do this so easily and it would make for an awesome repo
I don't think you are wrong per-se but whenever I see, let's take a more illustrative example, statutes and laws added to GitHub I can't help but think they are introducing a rather misleading narrative to the information. In this example, developers--especially on HN--have a cultural quirk anyway where they believe that the legal system can somehow be reduced or modelled as some sort computer program (when the reality is quite different) and having levers such as pull requests, review systems and diffs encourages this kind of thinking to some degree.
Sounds like a great idea! Let's license foods too!
11. BECAUSE THE FOOD IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE FOOD, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE FARMERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE FOOD "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR CONSUMPTION. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE FOOD IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE FOOD PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.
I really like how Soylent is versioning, I'm bummed I didn't get to try 1.1 because of the digestive enzymes, but will definitely try 1.2 in my next order. The iterative changes are really useful to keep track of, since they are pretty substantive changes in what you're eating.
Lots of things do have versions, but they just call them products, rather than Soylent DE and Soylent Algae, they're just increasing version numbers. I imagine this probably fits well with their target audience too. Unlike every_other_food_stuff versioning, people eating Soylent are usually not eating a bunch of other products so the versioning is meaningful.
> I am not a Soylent fan but I do like this food-versioning idea. What if all consumer food products were required to have versions numbers and a change log to detail out modifications?
Requiring a change log is probably overkill, but I've long wished that versioning was required on any food that is required to have a nutrition and ingredients label. The versioning would probably be most useful if it were simply the date of the last change to the ingredients or nutrition information.
Then all I'd have to do when buying some packaged food item that I've had before is take a quick look at the date, note that it is earlier than the last time I read the complete label and approved the item, and I'm good to go.
Such a requirement should be cheap and easy for the producers. If they have changed the nutritional or ingredient information, they have to make news labels anyway.
Once you have received your first shipment, and you use your email from previous order on future orders, you will receive shipments in reasonable time. I was one of the first backers on their crowdfunding campaign, and had to wait 1 yr before my first batch, but now I'm on monthly subscription so everything comes on time.
Generally speaking if you can get used to the taste IMO it's pretty amazing for alot of reasons.
BTW the taste is not as bad as many say, but it can be difficult to resist a trip to [your favorite restaurant here] for lunch every once in a while.
First, it fits my lifestyle. I work from home as an independent contractor, so no issues with having it for days at a time without hassle of bringing it to work with me every day.
Also, for the first week or so your body is adjusting to it, so in terms of social interactions you may not "be yourself". For example, for me, I would get tired randomly after a glass. After that first week or so things start getting back to normal.
I sometimes go on work binges depending on what I'm trying to accomplish, so in those circumstances the last thing I want to do is get up from my computer to spend even 1-2 hrs preparing and eating, then cleaning up after a meal just because my stomach is growling.
Second, my personal experience so far has been that it truly does give you that "full" / "satiated" feeling after you've had a glass of it. More so than pretty much any home or restaurant-prepared meal I've ever had. It lasts a long time as well. I don't have stats, but when I'm really busy and involved with a project I would say the number of times I get up from my desk to take a break, stretch my legs, etc. for one reason or another has decreased dramatically.
Third, generally speaking for a quick meal in the past it would be a trip to a restaurant, or some processed / high sodium, low in nutrition meal (ie. your mac and cheese, pizza, canned soups, etc). Now there's a basic peace of mind that I don't have to compromise nutrition just because I don't want to put the time and effort into preparing a healthy meal.
Fourth, general energy levels / focus throughout the day. Probably because overall I'm eating healthier during busy times, and the formulation is meant to maintain things like steady levels of blood sugar, etc. You don't get the peaks and valleys you sometimes can get after eating a heavy meal.
I'm no fan boy, though it might sound like it. It's one of those products I can seriously spend some time promoting to people because I truly do believe in it. If I had to guess, I would say (barring disaster) this is going to be a multi-billion-dollar company.
Doesn't just making a pot of soup once a week and microwaving a bowl whenever you want to eat cover all of the things you mentioned? That's all I do and it works fine and actually tastes good.
In a lot of respects you are probably right. But if we think about the details there may be some parts of the process that you aren't counting:
Keep in mind, I'm not actually trying to be sarcastic or annoying, but these are points I've actually thought about on my own that add up when you really think about it.
1) shopping (it takes me approx. 1 min to go onto my front porch to get the boxes of Soylent and bring them inside). If I'm making soup on a weekly basis, you have to figure for - Gas for car to travel to grocery and back. Time spent shopping. If you're in a complex, lugging the groceries up flights of stairs, unpacking and putting into refrigerator. Possibility of long lines at check out. Bad weather.
2) Refrigeration / spoilage (With Soylent, there is no need to refrigerate until you mix it together). If you want to purchase 1 month supply of ingredients for soup, perhaps some of those ingredients will go bad by end of the month. They almost certainly won't be as fresh as they were at the beginning of the month. That is if you're trying to make a healthy soup.
3) Nutrition. I am unaware of any soup whose ingredients are engineered to contain all the vitamins, minerals, nutrients, etc. that a human body needs in a day. Granted we don't know everything there is to know about human body and nutrition, but I'm going to guess I'm far less knowledgeable than the staff at Soylent given that it is their job to know.
4) Preparation time. I have eaten canned soups before, so if heating refrigerated soup is anything like that, you're spending at least 3 min at the microwave per meal, so though it's minimal it's more than it takes to (a) open refrigerator, (b) get a glass, and (c) pour.
5) Cost. For 1 month supply (on subscription) Soylent costs $255 (shipping included). This is technically 28 days worth, so this comes to a little more than $3 per meal. To make a soup as nutritious as Soylent, you will almost certainly spend more than this.
Is that just a general "I don't want soup for breakfast" or are you actually comparing to soylent for breakfast? I usually actually have eggs for breakfast, but I'd much rather have soup for breakfast than soylent.
>Doesn't just making a pot of soup once a week ... cover all of the things you mentioned?
No. I would not want soup for breakfast. A nice glass of Soylent with some Black Cherry (or other flavor) Mio stirred into it would be much better for breakfast. And that is what I do. And for lunch. And frequently for dinner. There are some very easy ways to quickly enhance the otherwise bland flavor of Soylent.
I don't shop. My groceries are delivered to my door. This is more expensive than paying for gas to go buy them, but it is still significantly cheaper than soylent. If this is not an option for you then I guess paying more to avoid shopping is reasonable if you can tolerate the taste of soylent.
It is trivially easy to make a soup that contains 100%+ of everything. Potato soup is the best if you are intending to just eat that one thing unless you like milk and eggs in your meat soups (I don't). I usually do a beef soup and have eggs for breakfast and cheese on the side with my soup but that's a taste preference.
The microwave doesn't require assistance. You can just turn it on and go back to what you were doing until it beeps at you.
I spend $65 a week including delivery fee and that's for two people.
For me it's just simpler. I drink 1000 calories of Soylent most week days. There have been no noticeable health effects. It's just much simpler to not have to worry about food.
As I mentioned in a comment above, I no longer develop calf cramps while surfing in cold water for an hour. A problem I've tried to solve many times but never could.
Patience. Just order it and sit tight. It will arrive... eventually. But the sooner you get on the list, the sooner you'll get your Soylent. And once you're in, you'll get your Soylent regularly.
Let's say in a few years time Soylent is successful enough to have multiple product lines. I wonder what, if any, advantages there would be to a variation that did include animal products.
I would assume it's cheaper and/or logistically easier to fulfill nutritional requirements with animal products. Presumably that's why Soylent used fish oil initially.
Depending on the concentration you're after and the form (triglyceride vs. ethyl ester), fish oil is almost an order of magnitude cheaper than algae-based omega-3s.
The price is just a question of scale since fish oil is often a byproduct or co-product with fish meal production for livestock, and millions of metric tons of fish meal are processed annually.
Fortunately for Soylent, a KG of wholesale Omega-3 from algae costs roughly $150/kg and they're only using 2.5G per serving, so you can figure maybe $0.30 - $0.40/serving depending on the concentration of Omega-3s in the powder they're buying. It is pretty interesting that maybe 1/10th of the cost is tied up in Omega-3s though.
We currently use SunButter but the taste is not the same. It is not bad but it is certainly not like peanut butter. I was interested in your link but I see it is made from soy. My youngest has an intolerance to soy. :( We would love to find "a nut-free, soy-free spread the tastes like peanut butter."
could you try to describe the taste? there was nothing in the FAQ and while I'm sure it is challenging to articulate, it would be great to get an idea before ordering only to be horribly disappointed.
Hey, would you be willing to swap a few bags of 1.0 or 1.2 (when they arrive) for some 1.1? I'd like to try it out to see if the digestive enzymes are worth dropping in to the 1.2 brew.
Sure. I've noticed that 1.1 is less sweet than 1.0, but I'm not particularly partial to either, and I haven't encountered any digestive issues with either version.
Did you notice the issue with the thickness in 1.1? For me, I get a lot of pretty epic farts with 1.0, so I was hoping the enzymes in 1.1 would address that :)
I've only had 1,000 calories of 1.1 so far. I didn't notice the thickness difference at the time, but when I saw the 1.2 blog post I thought "oh, maybe it was thinner."
I see Soylent is now completely vegan. This is interesting and will appeal to a new community for a range of ethical and environmental reasons, especially if it can deal with many of the common nutritional issues (B12, iron). I think another interesting marketing angle for the future of Soylent would be a measure of its carbon emissions[1,2] especially considering the somewhat unique distribution mechanism.
>if it can deal with many of the common nutritional issues (B12, iron)
What do you mean "if"? Those aren't really common nutritional issues specifically because they are so easy to "deal with". Vegans take a b12 supplement. The end. Obviously soylent also contains b12.
That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Do you have some reason to suspect that the diet you're currently eating is based on a more correct understanding of nutrition than a diet that includes Soylent?
Good question. I take a conservative view. I consider how our understanding of nutrition is limited, I look at the evolutionary morphology of our species and take a look at what we've adapted to eat for nearly a million years and favor that sort of food over something synthesized _this year._ I allow that Soylent may be better quality than this food. But the odds are it's not.
I don't mean to offend, but that sounds like irrational risk aversion, unless you have more information about nutrition and the development process of your usual diet vs. Soylent. My usual diet is fairly unorganized and not particularly well-researched (by me). I'm sure a huge amount of engineering and "artificial" processes have gone into most of it, just like with Soylent. I don't really see a dichotomy between a diet "naturally" formed by evolution over millions of years and a Soylent diet.
When you consider the iceman, a nearly 6,000 year old preserved corpse of a man pushing-50-years-old suffering from Lyme disease who was crossing the alps ON FOOT when he was murdered as irrationally healthy, I see your point.
Sorry, what I posted was idiotic and said in haste. One million years is a couple orders of magnitude too long, but humans have of course had agriculture for 10k+ years. My point, though poorly phrased, was meant to be that modern crops are far different (largely more efficient) than the crops that were grown in distant human history. Also, corn, wheat, and rice dominate the worldwide diet in a way that wasn't always the case. Soylent is largely composed of these same crops anyways so the point I failed to make is silly on a couple levels.
Lots of the world gets by mostly on rice. Soylent is oats, rice, starch, fiber and vitamins. It doesn't scare me, especially when supplemented with actual plants.
I felt the same way, but after reading several of the "month long" articles about Soylent where they frequently visited a doctor go make sure everything was in order, I was convinced.
Personally, I had a yearly check-up after a few weeks of Soylent and everything was fine, so I'm not too concerned. I'm definitely eating more appropriate portions and getting more diverse nutrients than I had been when stuffing my face naturally.
Unlike so many unhealthy "normal" foods, Soylent is at least trying to be healthy and nutritious. Worst case, it probably won't kill you any faster than a Doughnut Burger.
My experience so far has been mostly positive. After being on Soylent 1.1 for about two weeks (for 70% of my meals) I no longer have a problem with my calves cramping while surfing in cold water.
I've tried a bunch or recommendations in the past (magnesium pills, potassium pills, bananas, hydration, etc..) to fix this problem but nothing ever worked. After an hour my legs would always cramp and I'd have to end an otherwise good session.
I've only been in the water three times since starting Soylent, but so far no cramps. It must be giving my body something it wasn't getting before and I had a pretty healthy diet.
For the people that are concerned about the taste of Soylent: I personally don't think it tastes bad at all. It isn't super awesome either, but certainly not gross. I drank plenty of it straight and it was just fine. Having said that... I've had great success with adding a squirt or two of Mio[1] to it before I drink it. Easy to do and gives you a decent variety of flavors (however, they are all fruity).
> Our name was inspired by Harry Harrison's 1966 science fiction novel Make Room! Make Room!, which explores the impact massive population growth could have on world resources.
According to WP [1], this somewhat (?) obscure book was the inspiration for the name, not the extremely well-known movie that I need not name here. I assume this is sanitization by the marketing department?
In the book, the name applies to some manufactured food stuffs. But all the people that try to make the joke about it being made of people miss one important fact. In the movie, only the Green was made from people. There existed other variants that were not made of people. If this one was from the movie, it would likely be called Soylent Grey. :)
130 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] thread"$brand cereals 2.1.3.201411010: uses cheaper corn from a new producer, coloring of the red ones comes from a different horrible thing than the last one."
A simple google search indicates 488 mentions of Soylent on Hacker News, to be precise [1].
[1] https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
This shouldn't be a mystery at all, and I'm suspecting it's not really something you "never understood".
They also crowdfunded millions of dollars worth of orders, another aspect of the tech industry that gets people on Hacker News interested.
Personally, as someone who is very into fitness, I've been looking for something like this that is healthy compared to all the meal replacements in the store (which are not very healthy in big doses for a variety of reasons and aren't neutral-tasting enough to consistently eat). I've enjoyed my Soylent experience a lot despite not loving the ingredient mix 100%.
For starters, it's a Y Combinator company (host of Hacker News).
Secondly, it was developed by hackers.
Third, it is one of the foremost examples of hacking diet.
Fourth, the HN audience is a key audience of early adopting efficiency seekers.
Finally, people in the community have strong opinions about it both ways.
Never understood? Really?
> Fourth, the HN audience is a key audience of early adopting efficiency seekers.
There is nothing new about Soylent, apart from the unethical crowd-funding[1] and easy access to the public.
Liquid total meal replacements are common and have existed for a log time and are available from Amazon. They don't always push the total replacement aspect because lawyers and I guess because they never expected anyone to want to do so, but people live off existing products and have done so for years.
[1] "puts you in perfect health" and other unethical claims which seem to have been quietly dropped.
That is the main thing that is quite new. And also that extended meal replacement has not typically been marketed to this audience. Both of these are pretty huge, IMO.
I just ordered another 30 day supply last week. I've not yet received a shipping notice for that order. So I am hoping that it will be 1.2 rather than 1.1. I wasn't too fond of the idea of the added enzymes in 1.1.
And, while I'm not vegan, it sounds like the oil blend change will make things simpler on their end by no longer needing a separate sku and/or packaging process to eliminate the fish oil blend for vegans.
I'll try it some day when I can get 2 day shipping.
Sure it isn't THE soylent, but tons of people are collaborating on that one too.
Edit: Nevermind, read this comment: http://diy.soylent.me/recipes/people-chow-301-tortilla-perfe...
The amount of vitamins are dangerously higher than 100% recommended daily intake. Unlike Soylent which has mid-range http://diy.soylent.me/recipes/people-chow-301-tortilla-perfe...
I'd stay away from this recipe.
No they are not. Your comment link doesn't work, but the only comments I saw complaining about excessive micronutrients were baseless fearmongering. None of the micronutrients are even close to the TUL. All of the very high ones there are B complex vitamins that simply do not have an upper limit on intake. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin
> subjects taking vitamin A supplements were more likely to die from lung cancer than subjects taking a placebo. A third trial, SELECT, found that dietary supplementation with vitamin E (400 IU/d of all rac-α-tocopheryl acetate) in healthy men significantly increased their risk of prostate cancer. When I see recipes that contain micronutrient levels that are orders of magnitude higher than the recommended daily intake"
> This recipe has off-the-charts values for some nutrients, including 3000% DRI of thiamin, 2483% DRI of riboflavin, and 2583% DRI vitamin B6. Here’s a fun quote from the NIH office of dietary supplements (link below): “taking high levels of vitamin B6 from supplements for a year or longer can cause severe nerve damage, leading people to lose control of their bodily movements.”
He backed his claims up with citations.
His vitamin A study is completely irrelevant. Those studies are people taking 100 times the daily intake, which is well above the TUL. That is literally studies saying "if we poison people they get sick". 2.2x the daily intake is not 100x.
B6 is still way below the TUL, which is set at 10% of the amount that has been shown to cause damage. You would need to eat 30 times what this provides to be at risk. As I said, that is all fearmongering nonsense.
It all sounds wonderful, but I'd like the chance to actually try it.
I had no idea that you could produce oil rich in Omega-3 fatty acids from algae. And looking it up lead me to learn that you can also product more traditional fuels from algae as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel
For those who do care though, definitely examine the origin of your algae products. Most of the spirulina / haematococcus (for astaxanthin) / nannochloropsis by volume is grown in rather disgusting conditions in China and India. The US, Japan, and European products are much cleaner but are often GMO if that kind of thing matters to you.
Oreos version 2.3: Reduced count from 36 to 34. Increased price by 15 cents.
Pepsi version 3.0: Swapped sugar for high-fructose corn syrup.
For everything else, it would be impossible due to the nature of cooking itself.
EDIT:
There is also DIY Soylent [1] with some popular recipes, detailed nutritional information and versioning of each formula. People Chow v3.0.1 [2] seems to be one of the favourite recipes.
[1] http://diy.soylent.me/recipes [2] http://diy.soylent.me/recipes/people-chow-301-tortilla-perfe...
I don't think you are wrong per-se but whenever I see, let's take a more illustrative example, statutes and laws added to GitHub I can't help but think they are introducing a rather misleading narrative to the information. In this example, developers--especially on HN--have a cultural quirk anyway where they believe that the legal system can somehow be reduced or modelled as some sort computer program (when the reality is quite different) and having levers such as pull requests, review systems and diffs encourages this kind of thinking to some degree.
* price/unit * caloric_value/unit * other_nutrition_label/unit
...and with that we could control which food companies are resorting to tricks.
11. BECAUSE THE FOOD IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE FOOD, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE FARMERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE FOOD "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR CONSUMPTION. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE FOOD IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE FOOD PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.
Lots of things do have versions, but they just call them products, rather than Soylent DE and Soylent Algae, they're just increasing version numbers. I imagine this probably fits well with their target audience too. Unlike every_other_food_stuff versioning, people eating Soylent are usually not eating a bunch of other products so the versioning is meaningful.
Requiring a change log is probably overkill, but I've long wished that versioning was required on any food that is required to have a nutrition and ingredients label. The versioning would probably be most useful if it were simply the date of the last change to the ingredients or nutrition information.
Then all I'd have to do when buying some packaged food item that I've had before is take a quick look at the date, note that it is earlier than the last time I read the complete label and approved the item, and I'm good to go.
Such a requirement should be cheap and easy for the producers. If they have changed the nutritional or ingredient information, they have to make news labels anyway.
BTW the taste is not as bad as many say, but it can be difficult to resist a trip to [your favorite restaurant here] for lunch every once in a while.
First, it fits my lifestyle. I work from home as an independent contractor, so no issues with having it for days at a time without hassle of bringing it to work with me every day.
Also, for the first week or so your body is adjusting to it, so in terms of social interactions you may not "be yourself". For example, for me, I would get tired randomly after a glass. After that first week or so things start getting back to normal.
I sometimes go on work binges depending on what I'm trying to accomplish, so in those circumstances the last thing I want to do is get up from my computer to spend even 1-2 hrs preparing and eating, then cleaning up after a meal just because my stomach is growling.
Second, my personal experience so far has been that it truly does give you that "full" / "satiated" feeling after you've had a glass of it. More so than pretty much any home or restaurant-prepared meal I've ever had. It lasts a long time as well. I don't have stats, but when I'm really busy and involved with a project I would say the number of times I get up from my desk to take a break, stretch my legs, etc. for one reason or another has decreased dramatically.
Third, generally speaking for a quick meal in the past it would be a trip to a restaurant, or some processed / high sodium, low in nutrition meal (ie. your mac and cheese, pizza, canned soups, etc). Now there's a basic peace of mind that I don't have to compromise nutrition just because I don't want to put the time and effort into preparing a healthy meal.
Fourth, general energy levels / focus throughout the day. Probably because overall I'm eating healthier during busy times, and the formulation is meant to maintain things like steady levels of blood sugar, etc. You don't get the peaks and valleys you sometimes can get after eating a heavy meal.
I'm no fan boy, though it might sound like it. It's one of those products I can seriously spend some time promoting to people because I truly do believe in it. If I had to guess, I would say (barring disaster) this is going to be a multi-billion-dollar company.
Keep in mind, I'm not actually trying to be sarcastic or annoying, but these are points I've actually thought about on my own that add up when you really think about it.
1) shopping (it takes me approx. 1 min to go onto my front porch to get the boxes of Soylent and bring them inside). If I'm making soup on a weekly basis, you have to figure for - Gas for car to travel to grocery and back. Time spent shopping. If you're in a complex, lugging the groceries up flights of stairs, unpacking and putting into refrigerator. Possibility of long lines at check out. Bad weather.
2) Refrigeration / spoilage (With Soylent, there is no need to refrigerate until you mix it together). If you want to purchase 1 month supply of ingredients for soup, perhaps some of those ingredients will go bad by end of the month. They almost certainly won't be as fresh as they were at the beginning of the month. That is if you're trying to make a healthy soup.
3) Nutrition. I am unaware of any soup whose ingredients are engineered to contain all the vitamins, minerals, nutrients, etc. that a human body needs in a day. Granted we don't know everything there is to know about human body and nutrition, but I'm going to guess I'm far less knowledgeable than the staff at Soylent given that it is their job to know.
4) Preparation time. I have eaten canned soups before, so if heating refrigerated soup is anything like that, you're spending at least 3 min at the microwave per meal, so though it's minimal it's more than it takes to (a) open refrigerator, (b) get a glass, and (c) pour.
5) Cost. For 1 month supply (on subscription) Soylent costs $255 (shipping included). This is technically 28 days worth, so this comes to a little more than $3 per meal. To make a soup as nutritious as Soylent, you will almost certainly spend more than this.
These are the main points I can think of.
No. I would not want soup for breakfast. A nice glass of Soylent with some Black Cherry (or other flavor) Mio stirred into it would be much better for breakfast. And that is what I do. And for lunch. And frequently for dinner. There are some very easy ways to quickly enhance the otherwise bland flavor of Soylent.
Don't purchase 1 month's worth. Purchase 1 week's worth.
It is trivially easy to make a soup that contains 100%+ of everything. Potato soup is the best if you are intending to just eat that one thing unless you like milk and eggs in your meat soups (I don't). I usually do a beef soup and have eggs for breakfast and cheese on the side with my soup but that's a taste preference.
The microwave doesn't require assistance. You can just turn it on and go back to what you were doing until it beeps at you.
I spend $65 a week including delivery fee and that's for two people.
It's also nice not having to worry about food, especially if you're busy. Knock off to the fridge, pour a glass, sip as you go.
The defense rests.
That sounds like getting the fish oil is more costly than getting it straight from the algae.
The price is just a question of scale since fish oil is often a byproduct or co-product with fish meal production for livestock, and millions of metric tons of fish meal are processed annually.
Fortunately for Soylent, a KG of wholesale Omega-3 from algae costs roughly $150/kg and they're only using 2.5G per serving, so you can figure maybe $0.30 - $0.40/serving depending on the concentration of Omega-3s in the powder they're buying. It is pretty interesting that maybe 1/10th of the cost is tied up in Omega-3s though.
This stuff absolutely nails the taste although the texture is more in line with a Skippy or Jif than with better peanut butter.
It's made from peas. It's not quite as close to the real thing as the one that's made from soybeans, but it's pretty good.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/calebmelby/2013/06/07/a-week-wit...
Seems like people describe it as a liquidy bread dough or pancake batter taste.
[1] For example, http://www.foodemissions.com/foodemissions/Calculator.aspx [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_carbon_diet
What do you mean "if"? Those aren't really common nutritional issues specifically because they are so easy to "deal with". Vegans take a b12 supplement. The end. Obviously soylent also contains b12.
I would love a "what's new"
Personally, I had a yearly check-up after a few weeks of Soylent and everything was fine, so I'm not too concerned. I'm definitely eating more appropriate portions and getting more diverse nutrients than I had been when stuffing my face naturally.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Burger
Unlike so many unhealthy "normal" foods, Soylent is at least trying to be healthy and nutritious. Worst case, it probably won't kill you any faster than a Doughnut Burger.
I've tried a bunch or recommendations in the past (magnesium pills, potassium pills, bananas, hydration, etc..) to fix this problem but nothing ever worked. After an hour my legs would always cramp and I'd have to end an otherwise good session.
I've only been in the water three times since starting Soylent, but so far no cramps. It must be giving my body something it wasn't getting before and I had a pretty healthy diet.
[1] unlike during the kickstarter when they made a few.
[1] http://www.makeitmio.com/
According to WP [1], this somewhat (?) obscure book was the inspiration for the name, not the extremely well-known movie that I need not name here. I assume this is sanitization by the marketing department?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Room!_Make_Room!
(Though that goes to the age-old question of whether human is vegan or not :) )