Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrbig4545 | Hacker News Reader

I still can't believe Soylent is a thing. What is wrong with food? People who want this make no sense to me. None at all.

View on HN

Soylent isn't always used as a replacement for good food. It's used as a replacement for junk food that you would grab in a hurry.

This is spot on, for me at least. Soylent has completely eliminated junk food and late-night frozen pizzas from my life.

My problem is that, generally, I eat junk food less because I'm hungry and more because it tastes good.

I'm glad Soylent works for some people, at least.

Yes! I use it to keep me from snacking on junk.

Summer 2014 I traveled the US via motorcycle, camping for the majority of the nights. "Real food" takes time. Refrigeration, cooking, cleaning, time, not crushing it in transit... I also don't eat meat (and was vegan that entire summer), which makes finding decent food in many places (if you're willing to eat out) really hard.

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.

> "Real food" takes time.

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.

And what's the problem with that?

Because that's often time I'd rather spend doing other things.

Not everyone wants an "experience" every time they need to feed their stomach a morsel of food.

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."

Do you realize that you're basically saying "stop enjoying yourself, you're not doing it properly"?

Essentially there was next to no way for me to actually have food I wanted, keep it safely, cook it properly, etc. Sometimes I wanted to make it to a specific destination the next day. Fast food not being an option, setting up a small kitchen setup 3x a day really would put a damper on things.

Good question. I use Soylent as a meal replacement once a day. It's easier than cooking when I'm very busy during the day, very cheap, and I like knowing I'm getting some essential vitamins.

Or you could just buy Ensure, which has no trouble shipping and is available at nearly every grocery store and pharmacy.

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.

Soylent is not the same as Ensure - if you google soylent vs ensure, you'll see a lot of differences.

So your argument against it is, "somebody else already made something similar so why bother"?

No, my argument is I don't understand all the excitement here at HN for Soylent. It doesn't seem novel or exciting, but a lot of people act like its the best thing ever invented. I then attempted to guess at the reason, which is that it's marketed towards techies and hackers in the startup scene, which ensure isn't.

Other replies have given me additional information which I'm going to go over. Your's was setting up a straw man argument.

It has better balance of nutrients. Anyone can throw in some cheap vitamins and call it a day, but having enough potassium (which Americans under-consume compared to sodium), magnesium, protein, is rare. Soylent has 20% of RDA of EVERYTHING. Just check here:

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.

They really are different products. Is skeptical fit a while, but after dinner research I found that they really are not comparable.

Ensure is not the same thing as Soylent.

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?).

Maybe look into it more? Ensure and Soylent are very different products, even if they state similar purposes.

It's certainly marketed to the startup crowd as the startup work fast break things beverage.

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.

In addition to what others have said, the transparency of Rosa Labs (the makers of Soylent) is a big deal. Now that they have a manufacturing plant and so on, maybe things will change for the worse in the future, but up to this point they've been very open about their goal to produce a cheap, liquid, easy meal replacement, and they've openly supported the DIY community as well. They've also been adamant from the beginning that it's a process of continual improvement, and that's why Soylent is versioned, almost as if it were open source software.

You could file this all under marketing and not be technically wrong, but it makes a real difference in the experience as a consumer.

Not everyone wants to live your life. What's wrong with that?

I still can't believe cooking and cleaning dishes is a thing.

Cooking is nice, but I will never rent another apartment that doesn't have an automatic dishwasher.

Whenever I say this to people, they shake their head like I am crazy. I don't care, it's a deal breaker!

Is this a non-USA thing?

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.

Absolutely. Deciding on and preparing meals is the single biggest regular struggle and unpleasant time sink of my day. I wish I could get Soylent but they're still a bit slow and aren't selling directly to my country so I'd have to go through an importer/smuggler, upping the cost.

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>

>> No enjoy-cooking-people I know want to write software.

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

It's not a binary choice.

I have insufficient appetite and it's much easier to drink than eat when I don't feel hungry but need to eat to maintain my weight.

My doctor recommended Ensure but I later switched to soylent.

Vision of helping towards sustainable nourishment of ever growing human population is the best argument for Soylent-like solutions in my mind.

Never had a protein shake before?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com