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Comment by misiti3780 | Hacker News Reader

I'm probably going to get downvoted for this ... but honestly why do people want to eat Soylent? One of the great joys of life is food, Soylent taste like shit, eating it every day is boring, and no one knows the long term affects of eating it for long periods of time.

I'm a big fan-boy of a lot of stuff SV produces, Soylent does not impress me.

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As with most Soylent detractors, you're assuming people are eating this every day, or for every meal. In reality, it's great as a once-in-a-while thing. I bought some from a friend, and it was perfect for when I was hungry but running late for something. I had maybe 3 meals a week like this. Any time I told a friend I had some soylent, I got the exact same response you just gave.

Yep. I buy one box of Coffiest (12 bottles) per month. I usually drink them before I go swim early in the morning (2-3 times a week). Then, when I come back I get a regular breakfast. And I really enjoy the taste, so... none of the arguments apply.

I haven't tasted Coffiest before. Does Coffiest taste like coffee + soymilk?

I think it tastes like a Mocha flavoured protein shake.

I'll second that. I get a lot more mocha than coffee. Though the alertness effect seems to be consistent with having a small cup of coffee in the morning.

But why not go for a protein bar then? Quest bars for instance are delicious (I'd even prefer them to a candy bar), and pack a far more interesting macro profile than the Soylent ones.

> and pack a far more interesting macro profile than the Soylent ones.

What makes you say that?

It contains way more fat and carbs than protein. Fat and carbs are already cheap and plenty (just pick up a bag of crisps) everywhere around us, so if you try to replace one of your meals by something like this you might as well go for something that is more expensive/less practical to eat, like protein. It may just be my lifting background making me biased though as we typically require a higher protein intake.

I think the lifting background is biasing you. I'm also a lifter and I had the same thought when I first saw Soylent. But actually, I would dispute that fat is cheap and plenty. Carbs are for sure, but when I do the math I'm actually very unsure how a typical American diet would have either enough fat or enough protein, without scaling the whole thing to well beyond caloric maintenance, which is probably exactly what people are doing. Unless you're a serious lifter, the macro ratios in Soylent actually make a lot of sense if you are eating it for most meals.

You're right to point out that there is a bit of a conflict between Soylent's two goals of being both a viable replacement for every meal, and for any given meal. If you only eat one meal of it, it should probably counteract the bias of your other meals, namely, having too much carbs. But keto-Soylent would not be ideal for everyone using it as a complete food replacement.

As much as I too love Quest bars(the cookie dough one is insanely good), I'm not so sure I agree on the nutrient content:

http://files.soylent.com/pdf/bar-nutrition-facts-en.pdf http://www.questnutrition.com/protein-bars/choc-chip-cookie-...

Granted, they are trying to do different things; Soylent tastes like crap but has a lot of nutrients(supposedly a "complete" meal), whereas Quest is higher in protein and lower in sugar while tasting terrific.

Personally, I would still choose Quest over Soylent because I suspect that the idea that we need a constant intake of a wide variety of nutrients isn't really true. I'm not denying that we definitely need vitamins and minerals, but experience of going months eating very few vegetables(and almost entirely meat and cheese) has caused no noticeable health effects in me besides weight loss. We're made to think that we've got to eat a ton of vegetables and even take supplements, which I think might be more clever marketing than anything else.

But the micronutrient selection is only relevant if you only consume Soylent, and most people here seem to be saying that they only consume some Soylent products in replacement of a couple of meals/when they don't have time. So if the rest of your meals are normal meals you will have filled your micronutrients requirements already. Soylent is only beneficial then over a protein bar if you plan to eat garbage the rest of the day too, but then if you do the macronutrient profile of Soylent becomes pointless, because the garbage you are going to eat later on is probably going to be carbs and fat bombs (as garbage food usually is).

Therefore I don't really see the place that Soylent is trying to occupy and I can't help but dismiss it as another nutritional fad.

Exactly this. I enjoy great food as much as the next guy, but the alternative to Soylent for me isn't some delicious, nutritionally-balanced meal. The alternative is usually not eating at all due to a lack of time.

Its faster than grabbing say Tomato or Grapes as a snack / when running late? You are trading your health for a quick fix. Yeah if you are consuming processed foods daily then Soylent might be a good replacement but don't forget its still processed and heavy on GMO Soy like Lecithin (google it). PS. I used to be a Soylent customer having replaced breakfast and dinner with Soylent -- never again.

For me, at least, the problem is a tomato or a handful of grapes realistically isn't what I'll grab when I'm running out the door. I'm much more likely to just skip breakfast entirely or grab a bagel at a bodega. So while I would never want to consume Soylent exclusively, or probably even every day, I think it's net health-impact has been positive.

Not every meal is gourmet, sometimes you just need fuel. Additionally, some people don't really care about food as a pleasure to begin with.

Personally, I have a bottle of Soylent maybe once a week when I'm too lazy to make anything else, and I have a soylent bar a couple times a week at my desk when I need a snack but don't want to resort to a candy bar from the vending machine. A Soylent bar is 250 calories and has a reasonably good balance of macro and micronutrients, a Snickers bar is 215 calories and has an abundance of sugar.

I expect that there are relatively few people who consume Soylent as the majority of their calories. Besides, it's not like most people are eating meticulously balanced diets to begin with, so the "long term effects" point seems fairly moot to me.

> One of the great joys of life is food

The explanation probably starts here. This isn't true for me, and presumably isn't true for some other people as well.

Eat better food, and eat it mindfully. Really good food lights up every sense but hearing. Think of it like sex - you don't just hurriedly hop on top of each other and rub genitals as fast as possible until orgasm, that would be awful.

This is a great argument, and it makes me think of my favorite tea bar / restaurant in SF, Samovar. However there are downsides to eating like that too: it costs more and takes more time (either to prepare yourself, or to wait at a restaurant).

I've had food that is widely considered good, and while I do find it to be good, it's not good enough to be worth the trouble (which is where your analogy breaks down).

Really, it's just the day to day inconvenience of having to worry about where and what to eat that bugs me, because I don't enjoy food enough to make it worth the trouble.

Soylent is an excellent way to control costs and calories while saving time. You don't eat it for every meal. And it makes the meals you do take the time and have the money to prepare more enjoyable. Soylent prepared from powder is $1.93 per meal (500 calories) and is easily mixed from a packet of 4 meals at a time with the included pitcher.

My girlfriend and I drink soylent just about every morning for breakfast and then have a cup of coffee. We prepare it at night in about 2 minutes for the next 2 days. It's much better cold from the fridge than faucet temperature but mixes much better with faucet temperature water. It tastes like a mild cereal with a hint of vanilla (they changed the more recent versions' taste). It's helped us lose/maintain weight and keep food costs under control (NYC is expensive).

Just curious if you've tried Coffiest? This seems like the use case they were trying to hit.

I enjoy a hot fresh cup of coffee. I do enjoy the flavor of coffee in other things, but as I work from home, coffeist isn't a necessity for me.

Soylent and coffee is not a good start to a day. Neither provide morning hydration. Sacrificing your health because it's fast and easy is something my younger version used to believe too. And yes I have consumed Soylent in the past up to 3 times a day for months on end.

I was talking about food, not hydration. I drink 24oz of water with breakfast as part of drinking a gallon a day. I track my daily hydration with an app on my phone. 177 days in a row and counting.

Other people like the taste?

I like it fine. The bottled version tastes like alternative milk.

I love good food as well, both cooking and going to restaurants. But Soylent is fast and convenient for light meals. If I had a big lunch late in the day I might have it for dinner. But I definitely prefer "real" food for dinner with my loved ones. As for the taste, I think it's fine, kind of oatmealy, not oversweetened. If you don't like the flavor, fine, but that's your taste and not other peoples'.

While the early versions had a sort of wet-cardboard taste, the 2.0 (powder) and the bottles taste pleasant to me.

You have to compare it to what you'd eat otherwise. It may be possible to eat better, but the default for most people is to eat much worse.

Surely people who can afford Soylent can afford to buy decent ingredients, a rice cooker, and a crockpot right?

I mean a bottle of Soylent 2.0 is a lot less work to me when compared to making breakfast, and it tastes like Cheerios milk anyways.

Cereal is expensive, and not a great thing to eat most of the time. Make your own breakfast bars, cookies, or muffins. They'll taste better because you can tailor them precisely to your tastes.

Cereal is 1/5 or 1/10 the price of the Soylent 2.0 the GP mentions. Name brand cereal.

Get a decent blender, and you can turn frozen fruit and yogurt into delicious sherbet. Quick, healthy and _much_ tastier than soylent.

Almost certainly much better for you too.

How so? Most yogurt has a ton of sugar in it.

I didn't specify regular, plain yogurt rather than the junk food version because I assumed people were smart enough to know that junk food yogurt is junk, and there is plenty of sweetness from the frozen fruit. I would make a terrible contract lawyer.

The yogurt I eat has... yogurt in it. No added sugar, no added anything. Yogurt is also really easy to make yourself.

Most yogurt (even plain Greek) I see in stores has a lot of sugar in it. And the whole point here is that we don't want to make things ourselves.

I'm one of the few people that bounces between 70-95% soylent each month. I do the powder which is the cheapest option and it comes out to around $230/mo if it was my only source.

The average per person spending in the US is somewhere close to $300 per person if I recall correctly. Taking that into account with the time savings, and it's really quite cheap as a pure fuel source.

$220 on groceries (not eating out or takeout) for one person is enough to buy good stuff. You could make your own protein/fiber bars, yogurt smoothies, slow cooked foods. A freezer and a slow cooker will free you.

I guess I was taking the "people who can afford " part of your comment as "it's for well off people" when it's actually a reduction in spending for many Americans.

It matches up with the "Low cost plan" from the USDA for 2014: https://www.cnpp.usda.gov/sites/default/files/usda_food_plan...

I can see how'd you'd draw that conclusion from what I wrote, sorry for the confusion. I just mean that your money can be better, um... eaten, not that it's some kind of expensive luxury.

This depends greatly on where you live. I grew up in a middle class town in CT but now live in NYC. The price differential for groceries is huge. And compounded by the fact that you don't have a car, so you're limited in the stores you can reasonably go to and bring groceries home from.

NYC isn't totally unique, but it's hardly the norm either. Most of the people I've seen here at least, talking about Soylent, are struggling to find affordable groceries. Almost universally it's a variation on convenience or (to broadly paraphrase) "Freedom from food."

My SO and I have a stockpile of bottled Soylent. It's great.

There's always a nutritious meal available. Sometimes neither of us feels like cooking. Sometimes we don't feel like going out. Sometimes you're hungry, need some reasonably healthy food, but don't care if it's gourmet or tastes great as long as it's acceptable. Soylent does the job really well.

I also don't agree that it tastes like shit. The bottled Soylent tastes like soy milk to me, which I find delicious.

I'd say I personally only drink one bottle per week, maybe two. My SO uses it for breakfast fairly often (which previously she was in the habit of just skipping).

I think it's sort of an unspoken fact that this stuff is for people on adderall.

I enjoy food, but don't budget my time appropriately in the mornings. Soylent is my go-to when I'm leaving for my commute in the mornings and for nighttime if I end up working on my own projects at home too late to remember to make something, since I prefer not to eat solids right before bed.

Recently, two friends have given me their own reasons for choosing Soylent. One of them feels that eating is a chore, and the other is convinced that drinking amounts of it will allow their body to take more junk food on the weekend. Not the best reasonings in my opinion, but those are some of the opinions out there.

TBH, i think soylent tastes fine. But it's got what I can only describe as an after-texture that is somewhat unsettling. It's like an extremely fine sand coating your mouth.

The arguments I've heard generally come from people who think it's more convenient than alternatives they could make themselves. In my experience, those thoughts are incorrect, but it still explains the reasoning. I think the other reality is that people who don't like to deal with food, or have issues with food such as problems with obesity, or an eating disorder might think it's a solution to the "I can quit smoking, I can't quit eating" issue.

So, serious question then, because I've honestly been looking for this as a Soylent alternative.

Do you have any pointers to a meal plan that would give me full daily nutrition for say, a time/effort expenditure of around 20 minutes a day in preparation?

Let's say I'm totally cool eating the same thing for any given meal each day (though I'd prefer different breakfast/lunch/dinner within same day), and let's say I'm fine buying appliances as long as the maintenance/cleanup is within that time period too. Money isn't a concern here within reason. Since you mention rice cookers and crock pots (and I also have an instant pot) I can also work with set-and-forget as long as I only have to pay attention for 20 minutes or so.

The draw of Soylent to me is that I basically have no clue how to feed myself within time allotted, so I eat like crap grazing on what amounts to snacks or ordering out. I know Soylent isn't great but it's better than what I do on my own.

I'd love to have a healthier alternative, but I also know from experience that unless I can find something dead easy like described, I won't build the habit.

For me? I'm partial to cooking a lot of stuff at once and portioning it out, then freezing it. Pretty much anything with any kind of beans or lentils is easy to make in large quantities, tastes good and lasts a long time in the freezer. Rice cookers are a great multipurpose tool as well, and as a bonus they're great at making (and keeping) rice. Toss in the water and rice in the morning, come back to rice. Protein of your choice on a skillet or toaster oven, or nuke some of your stews, on the rice... boom.

I like (again this is my taste, yours of course may vary) oatmeal, coconut and fruit bars (the internet is full of good recipes for energy, protein, fiber, etc bars and snacks). They last a while in the fridge, and basically forever in the freezer. Another case of, "Make it when you have some time, and eat them for the rest of month or quarter".

Finally... sandwiches, salads, and soups. I also love granola with yogurt and honey, and eat that as my "I have some time to enjoy this" breakfast; only thing to cook is the granola, again once a month or so.

OK, those are good tips. Batch and freeze makes a ton of sense, though I'm not sure my freezer is up to it, and I do like the timer function on my rice cooker and instant pot (and also like rice, oatmeal, etc.)

I just wish I could actually find a decent and specific "sandwiches, salads, and crock pot" type 7-day (or even 1-day) meal plan out there that covered all the bases for times when I haven't done prep work. I'm a little lost as to how to combine the ingredients effectively--I know the concepts of nutrition, of course, but not the intersection of those and what practically works.

I see what you mean, and I'd just urge you to do some reading on it online when you get the chance. Some ideas of what that might look like:

http://whoneedsacape.com/2012/11/crockpot-freezer-cooking/

https://onceamonthmeals.com/blog/recipe-roundups/101-freezab...

http://greatist.com/eat/super-surprising-rice-cooker-recipes

Edit: My best advice is to think about what you have to work with in terms of appliances and such, and google search for recipes using them, along with things like "For a month" and that kind of thing. So much of this is down to personal taste; I mean if you don't like black beans, no amount of recipes for them will help you out.

Thank you very much for the pointers--these are quite helpful!

I eat super healthily, and I've managed to get my daily prep down to about half an hour in total, with a little extra time on weekends.

Breakfast - yogurt and frozen fruit blended into sherbet. I have 8 different kinds of frozen fruit in my freezer so there's plenty of variety.

Lunch - replaced by a protein shake at 11, then another one at ~2. I mix it with powdered drink packets, so there's plenty of variety there too.

Dinner - a crock pot with some kind of bean (again, I mix it up), a can of some kind of green (spinach/kale/collards/etc), some spices and some kim chi.

Elevensies (yeah, I'm like a jacked hobbit) - a piece of smoked meat and some sauerkraut.

The key is to keep the structure of your meals the same, and just have a rotation of ingredients that you swap out to keep things fresh.

This is super-helpful, especially the last part about using "templates". Thank you!

Of course it's more convienient! Soylent takes 0 time to prepare. Most other things take at least some time, and are often less healthy.

It takes me at least an hour to cook and eat 3 meals a day. Soylent takes almost no time to cook and consume. If you value your time at all (say, a very minimal $20/hour) that's $600 a month saved right there.

If you value your health, you won't just be eating Soylent.

To answer for myself personally, I don't eat it every meal. I tend to eat it for lunch on the weekends, if I don't have any particular lunch plans. It's cheap, reasonable-calorie and doesn't make me feel lethargic after eating it. In fact I feel pretty good after drinking one, usually.

The only reason I don't drink them more often is that it leaves me just slightly unsatisfied, and that dissatisfaction is distracting when i'm trying to concentrate on work.

For me it's convenience. I drink Coffiest a few days per week, especially if I wake up hungry or if I want to save time on breakfast that day.

Another aspect is that the nutritional content is better than me making a Pop-Tart or microwave breakfast sandwich.

Ease of use is one more. Literally just take it out of the fridge.

I'm equally guilty of being a foodie more often than not especially when traveling, but sometimes a simple routine optimization is just nice to have.

I am as puzzled as you, especially if the taste is as bad as you say. There is one industry that has already been focusing on making "healthy" stuff taste good for the past decades: the fitness industry. Why not just go for a good old protein shake? Or a protein bar? It costs almost nothing (except maybe the protein bars, which are comparable in price to soylent ones) and are nutritious enough.

Soylent doesn't replace good food. It replaces the crappy food we eat when we're in a hurry and just need some fuel.

I wake up on many days at 5am to head out for work. I go from butt naked in bed to out the door in ten minutes. Before Soylent I just skipped breakfast, now I can swig it down really quick. My lunches and dinners OTOH tend to be much nicer, but nothing beats the quick rush of nutrients.

What a life... you enjoy this?

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