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Comment by tlb | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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."

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.

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.

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.

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