The Real Soylent Sickness

God, it took all my energy not to close the tab after reading this opening sentence.

> But it [freeze-dried ice cream] wasn’t ice cream, it was a simulation of ice cream, and no one in their right mind would chose it over the cold, creamy stuff on a hot day. Not even an astronaut.

The "people aren't eating it because it's inferior" line is easily defeated by the fact that people are eating Soylent. I and a good number of other people choose Soylent over real food sometimes, so that line of reasoning is pretty much bunk. What is inferior, anyway? "Real food" is definitely inferior in terms of how much time it takes to prepare, say – and you can't assume that everyone has the same value system (e.g. taste over everything). Cost and convenience are absolutely essential factors to consider with food.

> Most humans are happy to eat real food, and crave it in its most natural form. A strawberry picked at the height of summer. Fish pulled from a river and grilled over wood coals. Sourdough bread made from a twenty-year-old starter, and kneaded by hand. Wine grown on knobby vines, and aged in a dark cellar. Why would you disrupt that?

Some humans, like myself, are also happy to eat "not-real" food like Soylent. Why would you disrupt that? Why is having more choice not just a problem, but a "sickness" as the title suggests?

I frequently see (and dislike) HN comments like "what was the point of this article?" but, in this case, I really have to ask. There are some really good reasons for not liking Soylent, like that it's not entirely proven yet that 100% of nutrients are absorbed when in the form that Soylent takes, so eating it daily may not be giving you all the nutrients you need—along with a bunch of other reasons. Yet this article settles for "it's not real food and people shouldn't be eating it."

N.B. Maybe the real Soylent sickness is that people like me who drink Soylent go on online forums to write walls of text defending it.

It must be hard for the cultural elite to realize that their opinions on what people want and where culture is heading are empirically testable and often false when tested.

From TroyAtWork in the Soylent subreddit:

>Frozen waffles that have a little freezer burn but you scrape it off and pretend it never happened. A box of pasta that you dress up with assorted spices because you are too lazy to make a fully balanced meal. A can of soup that is loaded with sodium but it's late at night and you just want to get something in your stomach so you can sleep.

Not many people, even those who write posts criticizing Soylent, are affluent foodies who adhere to the "modern food movement". Rosa Lab's awful marketing takes plenty of blame, but I suspect that at some level David Sax just sees the potential for better nutrition that could be more feasible than the "back to nature" route. By his own admission, it's difficult and expensive. The presence of somewhat reasonable organic foods at wal-mart doesn't really change either of those facts, it just means that middle class moms don't have to make an extra trip to buy their organic produce.

    > Soylent was developed ... to compress all the nutrition the human body needs to live into one single, easily digestible formula. But that is fundamentally the opposite of the way we increasingly want to eat in America and in much of the developed world.

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    David Sax is the author of “Save the Deli” and “The Tastemakers.”

What a pile of inedible flowery word salad. David tries to tell us all what "we" want out of food, while contradicting himself by recognizing that Soylent has a market; all the while he has not even tried the product.

I would hate hate hate living on Soylent three meals a day. That would suck. But on the other hand, three awesome meals a day isn't really feasible either. It would take a lot of time to build the skills to cook like that, and it takes a lot of time even when you know how. There's no way I could fit that into the rest of the life I want to live, so some compromises on the food front are necessary.

Is he asking The Valley to produce and market mass-produced food as if it was less mass-produced than the entirety of the current processed foods industry is able to?

The entire shtick of Soylent is to kill all the romance around food. Is he asking them to just not serve a market segment that's not tuned into current trends?

For tech companies leave the tech behind when producing food? (in which case they'll tautologically no longer be the people he's calling on)

For tech companies to bring high tech to farming low-tech produce? (they do, but they sell to the farm who's name is on the label)

Or is it a metaphor, and he wants tech in general marketed more romantically?

Or are we just supposed to sit back and listen to David Sax brag about his refined tastes and demonstrate how insightful he is about what Americans want from food? That's just public masturbation. I'm sex positive and all, but why does The New Yorker think we would want to watch?

My brother-in-law's dad had a small company that freeze-dried foods for NASA. I got to sample freeze-dried everything. At the time it was the food of the future.

I will never drink Soylent, not because I think the idea of Soylent is bad (it's verifiably not, look at the number of people who do like it) but because I have no interest in it, because I know that real food is absolutely better in every way I care about (nutrition, taste). But I also understand that Soylent, even if it is marketed as a meal replacement, will never replace meals, so I don't really care. In my eyes, it's my generation's version of my mom's Slimfast.