Soylent Shipping Delay Root Cause Analysis
blog.soylent.com
blog.soylent.com
We've all gotten new food at some point that had gone bad; and yet I assume most of those companies just kinda shrug it off as long as it's below a certain threshold.
Also, food poisoning is always a risk when eating but it's not a life-shortening or baby-deforming kind of risk like, say mercury or lead overdose can be. Farmed products can have these contaminants but not usually consistently in every meal just because they're from varied sources.
I have a personal rule of never drinking Soylent more than once in a day and never two days in a row. But I consider it a worthwhile, affordable, and extremely convenient addition to my diet.
(1) I figure that at best Soylent has the nutrients that we know we need, but not the ones that we don't know we need. Over-reliance on Soylent might mean missing out on these nutrients, even if the health effects of doing so are very delayed.
(2) I've read reports on how the simple act of chewing food has an effect on digestion and other processes.
(3) Pure Soylent may not cultivate gut flora in the same way as normal solid diets do.
(4) I enjoy cooking and don't want those skills to atrophy because it's so much easier to just grab a bottle of Soylent.
(5) The rule also encourages me to go out with friends or invite people over more.
It's not a hard and fast rule -- it's just something I generally try to abide by, both as a risk-minimizing mechanism and as a general effort to force me to enrich my life more.
Why is it any more likely that your traditional diet provides the nutrients that we don't know we need?
Soylent is deterministic. In-fact Soylent's goal is to be deterministic and as such will only become more deterministic as time progresses. Any two Soylent's will be the same.
Traditional food on the other hand, especially through variety, is by its nature non-deterministic. Example: You happen to be a patron of an icecream parlor. Today you buy/eat mango icecream, unknown to the parlor the mangoes happened to be from the east coast of Mexico. Tomorrow you buy/eat "the same" mango icecream, but these mangoes happened to be sourced from the west coast of Mexico. Was it the same? This example, doesn't even account for the variety involved with "traditional food", which only increases the stochastic nature of its nutritional properties.
Having defined that (hopefully we agree on the axioms), we can continue on to discuss the nature of problems where "we don't know [what] we need". Until we know what we need, the optimal strategy to satisfy an unknown goal is through non-determinism (again, hopefully we agree).
Based on the above:
I'll try to make a more succinct argument:
Given that Soylent contains everything we know we need.
And we know we don't know everything we need.
Then only consuming Soylent guarantees we do not satisfy all of our needs.
We must then consume things we do not know, to increase the probability of satisfying all our needs.
P.S. I am all for scientific experiments to better determine the unknowns and turn them into knowns. However, as long as there are any unknowns, the above points still hold.
I'll try one last time with an analogy.
Lets play a game: I will think of two numbers (range: 1..10) and you're going to guess which numbers they are.
I'm going to do you a big favor and guarantee you: I'm going to always pick 7. I will also guarantee you, the other number will never be 7.
To reiterate the givens: My numbers will be in the domains: [7] AND [1,2,3,4,5,6,8,9]
You get to pick two numbers. Would you pick 7 AND 7?
I hope not. 7 AND 7 by definition will always lose (probability of winning: 0%). Introducing variety for the second number will clearly increase your probability of winning to 1/8 = 12.5%.
Granted, the probability of winning is still low, and 12.5% assumes a random distribution, but its higher than 0%.
Now, similarly, lets a play a game: I am going to think of all of the nutrition that you need and you're allowed to guess two meals that will encompass all of that nutrition.
I will do you a favor and guarantee you: Soylent will get all of the food that we know we need (if you pick Soylent as one of the meals you will only need a tiny set of additional nutrition to win). I will also then guarantee you, we need things that we don't know, therefore since Soylent only has the things we know, we need at least one nutritional "thing" not in Soylent.
To reiterate the givens: Meals will be in the domains: [Soylent] AND [...everything except Soylent]
You get to chose two meals. Would you pick Soylent AND Soylent?
I hope not. Soylent AND Soylent by definition (in this game) will always lose (probability of winning: 0%). Introducing variety for the second meal will clearly increase your probability of winning. The increase in probability is not calculable, however it is non-zero.
Granted, the probability of winning is still very low, however, variety provides a non-zero probability while only-Soylent provides 0%. Clearly then, variety is the better option over only-Soylent.
Does that at all help? Am I just being trolled?
Either way, this was fun. glhf, and thanks for reading.
To make the issue with your analogy clearer, note that you could invent any somewhat edible product and make the claim that adding it to your diet makes your diet safer, because of the possibility that it contains nutrients we need but which we don't know we need.
I could instead offer the following weaker form of what I wrote previously. We know that Soylent does not offer any nutrients that we don't know we need, whereas we do not know that traditional foods do not provide any nutrients that we don't know that we need. It does not follow that they do, but this at least recognizes the possibility.
I find it unlikely that nutritional science has reached its end state, so I don't want to bet too much on Soylent being perfect. At the same time, malnutrition was the norm for most humans for most of our existence, so we can't defer to much to traditional diets.
I don't take either Ensure or Soylent (and I'm not sure that USDA recommendations for a 2k calorie diet are that good). It appears that Ensure tries to match a 100% USDA recommendation for caloric profile (at 9 servings per day fat/carbohydrates almost add up to 100%), while providing way over the recommendations on vitamin/minerals (~225% for most, close to 500% for a couple). On the flip side, Soylent appears to try to hit the vitamins/minerals 100%, while having a high fat, low carbohydrate profile (175% fat, 60% carbohydrates).
On the whole, it looks like they are not really replacements for each other, other than in the broad category of "meal replacements" since the caloric profile, and serving sizes are so far away from each other.
Personally, I'd go with the high fat, low carbohydrate version since I've found that those types of meals (in general, not specifically for "meal replacements") tend to keep me more satiated for longer periods of time.
[0] - https://ensure.com/nutrition-products/ensure-original#vanill...
[1] - http://files.soylent.com/pdf/soylent-nutrition-facts-2-0-en....
That does not mean such things are Ideal just that they work acceptably well for young healthy people.
Wouldn't this put them well above the industry standard rate of 1 in 10,000 bottles quoted earlier in the article?
I don't get Soylent's appeal, and I don't understand what unmet needs in the market it is meeting. My best guess, people that want to feel like they are "hacking" eating. Which is really just different marketing for a meal replacement shake.
Other replies have given me additional information which I'm going to go over. Your's was setting up a straw man argument.
files.soylent.com/pdf/soylent-nutrition-facts-2-0-en.pdf
Soylent is still low on protein for my tastes because I lift weights and I'm shooting for at least 150g a day.
1. It is way more expensive than Soylent powder.
2. It has too much sugar and too little of everything else. If you scale the calories to 2000 you'll have 400% of your daily recommended value of some nutrients and 50% of others.
3. It comes in annoying sizes (one bottle is only 240 calories, wtf?).
If you go into a health food store like whole foods, there's a dozen or so other meal replacement options very similar to Soylent. Some soy free, some with exotic herbs and algae, some high protein, and all within the same price range.
You could file this all under marketing and not be technically wrong, but it makes a real difference in the experience as a consumer.
Here in the USA the modest apartments I was renting more than 30 years ago had dishwashers. However, I didn't always use the dishwasher because it's hard for one person to generate enough dishes a day to make it worthwhile to run. Especially if frozen food made for microwave heating is a large part of your diet.
I know some people like cooking. That's fine for them. I like coding and I do that for fun. No enjoy-cooking-people I know want to write software. Different strokes for different folks.
We need to get out of the mindset of some kinds of work being "noble". When I was growing up it was "noble" to clean dishes by hand, repair your house yourself and repair your car yourself.
Now that I'm an adult, most people I know have "failed" and are lazily hiring specialists or using machines for those once-noble tasks. And some are very successful in their lives despite that failing! </s>
I enjoy cooking, I enjoy eating what I cook and I write software because I want to.
When I think about it, I'm actually a bit sad I can't taste my own code :7
I'm glad Soylent works for some people, at least.
I unfortunately didn't get my original Soylent 1.1 in time for the trip, but how I wish I'd had it.
I don't use Soylent on a daily basis, but I always take it camping or on extended trips. I'd rather have a decently balanced food source (nothing is perfect) then eat greasy fast-food or just go hungry so I can make an extra 100 miles of travel before sunset.
And what's the problem with that? Surely you didn't travel via motorcycle complaining that motorcycles are "too slow" for the trip. It was an integral part of your traveling experience and without it it would've been completely different.
Eating is a normal part of life. Any inconvenience in it is exactly part of a human experience, much like what you wanted with the trip. If your bike broke down for that extra 100 miles or if it was too cold in camping it wasn't "an issue", it was just life. You could have solved those two issues by traveling by plane and staying in hotels, but that's exactly the kind of convenience that you wanted to avoid.
Because that's often time I'd rather spend doing other things.
People are pretty capable of deciding that for themselves. No need to try to convince anyone what kind of appetite they should have for ceremony and the, deep voice, "human experience."
My doctor recommended Ensure but I later switched to soylent.