The real Soylent sickness
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Grocery shopping for one is frustrating; either I buy portions I know I can not eat before they spoil, wasting money and food, or I buy only a few ingredients and cycle through the same meals over and over. Last week I was annoyed to discover Kroger discontinued its half-dozen egg cartons, and I still have not found any reliable way of buying small enough quantities of bread/buns before they grow stale or mold. I'm fairly confident I am doomed to forever spoil cheese and milk. It seems that grocery chains market portions to target a household size of four, exclusively. Soylent, on the other hand, has a shelf-life of 1 year.
Besides, most people's freezers aren't big enough to store an entire grocery shopping's worth of goods.
And for what it's worth, I thaw my meat in the fridge. Just throw it in there and it's taken care of in a safe, hygienic environment. Not really "a process in and of itself."
I never said that.
https://breakingbelgium.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/bachelor...
Soylent 1.6 (powder) is "$1.93 per 500 kcal" where 2000kcal is what most people eat a day. If a meal to you is one third of 2000kcal, it costs 1.93 * ((2000/500) / 3) == $2.57 per "meal."
Soylent 2.0 (drink, bought because it's "more convenient") is "$2.69 per 400 kcal." If a meal to you is one third of 2000kcal, it costs 2.69 * ((2000/400) / 3) == $4.48 per "meal."
So compare either of those to either your dinner or snack expenditures. To me it seems that 1.6 can save you money on dinner, while 2.0 is intended to help you save money on "snack time".
Too much flavor could make it annoying to have regularly day after day. They're specifically aiming for a neutral flavor.
>Maybe even a little rebranding?
Yes, they know they sound like "Soylent Green". It's the point and gets you to recognize the name.
But even putting your feelings aside, the issue with the same meal over and over is that it does not provide your body with what it needs. Soylent solves that: have Soylent and you don't have to worry about varying your meals, or about how much salt, sugar or fat you are eating.
And going back to the feelings side, Soylent feels different. It's supposed to be like that, and that somehow makes it feel much more okay. There are also variants that add flavors (making me worry about sugars again, but not as much as with normal food), for example I usually order a week's worth of food which comes in 5 different flavors (so you have two duplicates). I take about a year to consume them though, it's not like I run on Soylent full-time.
I eat exactly the same breakfast and lunch 5-7 days a week. It's easy, relatively cheap, and the routine keeps me from screwing up my calorie counts.
Dinner has some more variety, but I'd be up for pizza every day if it weren't for the cost and health issues.
Not a totally fair comparison here, since our neighborhood pizza places routinely show up on "best pizza in the US" lists...
Maybe it's because drinking some Soylent isn't an 'activity' like eating a prepared meal is, but rather just something I do while doing something else, so I don't notice it as much (which I think is part of why it's designed to be neutral tasting).
Bread keeps for months if you freeze it immediately after buying it (slice it first if it doesn't come pre-sliced). Then, just pop it into the toaster whenever you want to eat some, and it comes right back to life, not stale-tasting at all. I don't eat food at home that often, but I haven't had to throw away any bread from mold or staleness since I started freezing it.
You say this like it's a feature not a bug.
> Grocery shopping for one is frustrating
Like other valuable skills, you can get better at it.
I think it sounds more like they are saying that it's a preference. Preferences are generally neither features nor bugs (though they can be useful in some situations and frustrating in others).
Going out to eat may be tastier, but it's generally more expensive. When it's not more expensive (than Soylent) it's often to some degree a mixture of the following:
1. Not vegan
2. Not tasty anyway (i.e. fast food)
3. More time consuming (the place that you like is far enough away)
I'm certain you can find other potential reasons.
Each of these may affect different people for different reasons and to different amounts (e.g. some may not care about vegan).
Ultimately, it's up to each person to decide on their own personal preferences, and the weigh their own perceived costs. For some, that may result in Soylent being a preferred option for some meals (these preferences are dynamic). For others, it's never a preferred option. That just seems like part of being human, to be honest; no sense for either side to get upset at the other.
As far as I'm concerned it is a feature. So many hours are completely wasted in meal prep that I could spend doing literally anything else. Like reading a book or not cooking.
>Like other valuable skills, you can get better at it.
I don't see how I can feasibly remove every other grocery shopper from the store when I go shopping. Or people who stop in the middle of the isle preventing traffic flow in both directions, kids acting up [0], the choice between annoying small-talk with the cashier or the annoyance of the faulty self-checkout machines [1]. People rushing around corners, nearly hitting people. The annoyance when the singular item you're searching for is out of stock that day. The store now has mounted televisions spamming ads for products on every other isle - now I get to shop with headphones on, yay!
I have control over nothing. There is nothing to get better at. Like driving (another annoying but necessary thing), it is something that so many people do without consideration or thought of others that the entire experience is ruined. I don't mind driving. I hate driving with other people on the road who cut across traffic, fail to signal, randomly brake for no reason, and otherwise drive like they are the only person on the road. Grocery shopping suffers the same fate: it sucks because everyone else seems to suck at it. And unlike driving on an empty road at two in the morning, there aren't many places I can go shopping for groceries at two in the morning.
It takes me less than ten minutes to purchase a week's worth of groceries. I've purchased the same exact things week in and week out for the past three years. I practically have my weekly trip down to a science. It seems to be that nobody else has figured out how to shop for groceries.
If you have a fix for removing other people from the equation that isn't illegal, I'd love to hear it.
[0] Kids act up, that's fine. I grew up with younger siblings. The difference is my mom would at least make an attempt to get them to stop throwing a tantrum in the middle of an aisle. It seems some parents have given up on the parenting part altogether.
[1] "Please bag your item." when the item has already been bagged. Continue until the clerk watching the self-checkouts comes over and kicks the machine out of the error loop. No way to enter "x20" of an item, I regularly purchase two dozen individually-packaged cans of chili. So I get to scan one of them 24 times and hope I don't lose track as there is no way to count how many I've already scanned.
Look into freezing. Way more things than you'd think handle freezing well. Cheese, bread (toast or even just warm it briefly before consuming for maximum tastiness), and milk for example. Not eggs unfortunately (yeah, I tried).
And some things are in between, eg bananas without skins can be frozen and eaten frozen, if you like the taste and texture, but you can't defrost them and get back a banana like you had before you froze it, it'll just be nasty goop.
So, if in doubt, just try freezing it and see what happens.
Also, turning the temperature on your fridge down may extend the life of some things (but will also waste more energy, so experiment to see if it's a good tradeoff)
http://www.thatrecipe.com/blog/2014/03/06/daniel-tiger-banan...
But also, most cheese mold is a surface only phenomenon. Remove what you can see and continue eating (doesn't apply to soft cheeses)
https://www.amazon.com/Formaticum-Cheese-Storage-Bags-Count/...
There are various other storage techniques for making food last longer which you might try.
With a taste and mouth-feel to match. Bon appetit!
Also, you're probably unlikely to find much measured to 100 or 200 grams in any US supermarket. It's all ounces (both fluid and otherwise!) here. ;)
Just want to counter so the parent poster knows that yes, it is very common to find single sticks of butter or half-dozen egg cartons in many grocery stores. I can't think of any that don't have these things.
When I was single I'd make family portion, eat 1/3, freeze the others. Bread freezes perfectly too. Other than that I shared your frustration of stores - buy a thing for £1, get three of them for £1.30. So choice of hugely overpay or risk waste. Milk prices are especially offensive under half gallon.
If you sterilize the shells and dip them in mineral oil or cheese wax, they can be kept at room temperature for much longer.
I used to live in a country with giant, mean roaches, so I got in the habit of refrigerating everything. Surprised it's not more common to do so w/ bread.
We buy 1.5 gallons at Costco for the two of us and never had it go bad.
...
Ah, a little googling, and it turns out it's a byproduct of the procedure to remove the lactose, Ultra Pasteurization (UP) or Ultra High Temperature (UHT) pasteurization. [1]
1: http://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/34884/why-does-...
I guess the quality of the food you have in the US is very different to what we have in Europe (or we just have lots of preservatives). Fresh milk usually lasts a week (I usually get the smallest 250ml pack), where as I can have 1 litre of UHT milk last a month without any noticeable difference. Cheese... well it lasts until it's eaten, it just goes a bit hard. I've had a packet of grated parmesan in the fridge for nearly a month, and a wedge of pecorino uncovered for two months, and both are still good.
Someone who is buying real cheese in the US is not really in the wheelhouse for soylent, we are probably talking about a big block of mass-produced yellow cheddar here. Most likely it is being stored improperly in a ziploc bag or similar and the retained moisture is causing premature mold growth.
According to Wikipedia cheddar is the most popular cheese in the UK but not, it turns out, in the US. In the US the most popular cheese is apparently … mozzarella.
Not sure what any of this goes to prove (that Yanks eat a _lot_ of pizza?) but I guess I'm trying to say that I associate cheddar with British cheese-making in the same way I'd associate brie with French, edam and gouda with Dutch, feta with Greek, manchego with Spanish, and so on.
I eventually switched to lactose-free milk, which lasts longer and theoretically lets me consume it more freely, but... I've thrown some of that away, too, since I just don't drink enough of it to be worth buying.
It may be worth noting that I can buy a gallon of milk for $1.79. Throwing away the spoiled remains isn't expensive for me, it just feels wasteful.
The local bakery sells half loaves of bread which does a pretty good job of it. If that's a problem, I have friends who have bought bread makers which allow for the making of smaller portions.
As to milk, if you don't mind the taste of ultra-pasteurized milk, Fairlife[1] is pretty good and lasts a lot longer in the fridge. Their chocolate milk is really chocolatey.
1) technically fa!rlife
Less sarcastically -- I've come to find that learning how to not just cope with, but enjoy the food acquisition process, end-to-end -- from procurement, to cooking and prep, and yes, even washing dishes and maintaining a decent kitchen; but most of all, preparing delicious meals for friends, now and then (and all of this, on a shoestring budget, if necessary) -- to be one of the most valuable life skills one can acquire.
So if you're currently finding it "frustrating" -- that's a good thing, because it means that your body is correctly signaling you to the fact that there's not just an opportunity to learn, but to make great efficiency gains but just a modest investment in just... figuring out how food works.
Taking milk as an example -- you're absolutely right that the chains are wrongly optimized in a lot of their offerings; the quart- (or gallon-!) sized milk offerings being a great example. At the end of the day, "milk", as such, is just not a great item to have in one's list of staples -- yogurt and kefir provide very much the same nutritive value (and overall "milk-experience", in my view) with much better shelf life, and much better value per unit cost, overall. Or if you must have "milk", as such, just a small bottle of raw (or appropriately pasteurized) milk from a high quality dairy (this is crucial), which you'll find you'll need to drink only about 1/3 the amount of compared to the usual chain-offered "big dairy" milk, will do just fine.
But the thing about Soylent -- the really "real sickness" about it, in my view -- is that rather than address this frustration by getting to its root cause (lack of awareness of how food works, on a basic level; and how awesome things can be when you get your food supply right, or at least working for you, rather than against you) -- it simply masks it. And on top of that, rather insidiously promotes dependence (on a brand) -- rather than independence and self-sufficiency -- as a way of addressing the problem.
Some people would rather trade the highs/lows of grocery shopping and cooking for simple, healthy meals, but mostly bland meals. I don't think Soylent is the answer for everyone, it's a niche the same way Whole Foods is a niche. But they do have a real value prop that is easily overlooked if you only look at the food part of it, instead of all of the other processes around it.
Right -- as with the entire junk food industry in general, basically.
As in: yes, there's certainly a big "value prop" in getting you past that next perceived craving (or legitimate nutritional need), as expediently as possible. But whether that provides a good "value" in the long run (either nutritionally or financially) is highly questionable.
But whether any of these actually are viable "replacements" (considering long-term health and other side effects) is again very much open to question.
Food is life. If you've replaced food with some manufactured shake, it just seems fundamentally wrong. Meals aren't obligations, they are when people get together. They're a time to reflect and experience life. WTF are you doing that eating dinner is too much of a burden?
I can see using something like Soylent as a backup for fueling up while traveling or leaving it at your desk or in the car for a pinch situation. Full on food replacement conjures up images of lonely, single people giving up on life.
Your “lonely people giving up on life” is a huge reach. It’s just food. People are capable of socializing outside of meals.
Setting that aside for a moment, though, you also don’t have to replace every meal, as is mentioned elsewhere in the comments. How about just breakfast? Despite it being greatly beneficial to start the day with food, many people feel like they don’t have the time. Something quick, filling, and taking no preparation is ideal.
"Powerfood" additives, being basically an orthogonal component -- aside, it's basically a powdered (or perhaps pasteurized concentrate, a la Minute Made) remake of the classic, fresh-everything version of your regular breakfast smoothie.
You don't see any issues with that?
The hackles come up when it's promoted or discussed as a broader meal replacement.
Which just so happens to be Soylent's business plan.
But yes. Their broader business plan and certainly what gets the press seems to be Soylent as broader meal replacement. If this were just another "nutritional drink on the go" absolutely no one would care.
The meal replacement industry seems to be large enough to support this product and others, but it's still a niche, overall. It's fighting against a prevailing trend towards spending more time on food and not less, and understanding more about where our food comes from and how it's produced.
Uh, speak for yourself.
I order Soylent from time-to-time. It's a nice way to simplify about 75% of my meal prep, while remaining healthy and helping me avoid constant snacking. If I was on my own I'd consider 100% Soylent.
You don't need three gourmet meals a day. Food is a convenient social activity, but it's not the only one.
So many issues with this article, but this one...
> the persistent effect that progress in food processing has had on our taste buds, as we amp up artificial flavors in an attempt regain the natural flavor we have stripped from our food with technology
If you'd ever had Soylent, you'd realize that it's entirely the opposite of an "amped-up, artificial flavour". It's not bland - it has a light flavour that isn't offensive no matter how much you drink.
Research has shown we get most of the nutrients we need from our first meal (of whole foods) each day. We only need calories from that point on. Shouldn't we then just try to get the most efficient form of calories, so long as those calories don't do harm? Leave the other 2 nutrient-rich meals for the rest of the world.
He frames it as "this is not what Americans want." But just because we can increasingly eat 3 nutrient-rich meals doesn't mean we should. In fact, it means the opposite -- that we should give those meals away because we can.
Not disagreeing but this is the first I've heard of this. Do you have any sources on hand?
Thats yet to be seen. This food is a processed as you can get, I have my doubts that it will be good for you in the long term.
from- https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/203709619-Soylent-...
I also enjoy saying "Numerous scientific studies have suggested..." while linking to none.
You are saying you disagree that the constituent components of an egg are the source of its nutritional value?
Do you suggest that something inside a chicken imbues in the egg ephemeral nutritional properties that our digestive system cannot extract from an equally proportioned mix of fat/cholesterol/protein/etc that was produced in a man-made factory rather than a hen?
The makers of Soylent, on the other hand, are pretty good at making broad sweeping nutritional claims without bothering to back them up with legitimate science.
But I know we absorb things differently depending on what we found them in. We absorb protein differently if they come from mat or from vegetables. We absorb calcium differently if it comes from milk or from a pill.
So in that case, I think think that assuming the nutritional value of some food comes only from its composition is a claim that needs serious backing.
In fact, this is such a stupid oversimplification that any amount of critical thinking can debunk it. There is a lot more to food that the net nutrition intake you have at the end of the day. The actual, physical composition of the food determines how quickly you body digests it, which in turn affects your energy levels, appetite, and mood. Your body does not digest apple juice the same way as it does raw apples, even if both have the same exact ingredients. You won't feel the same after a smoothie as you will after the same ingredients delivered raw. One method of intake gives you a short, high burst of energy followed by steeper drop off, while the raw form provides gentler changes and is less likely to spike your blood sugar.
All of this interacts with your psychology, your metabolism, and your physical and mental energy.
This is like saying I can safely fast for 4 days once If I eat 6000 calories worth of [insert food/drink] today. You might survive for 4 days but good luck not tearing up your body and feeling like a ghost by then.
More-processed foods are not inherently "bad" or "unhealthy", but they are inherently worse and less healthy than less-processed foods (generally). They contribute to shorter periods of feeling satiated and longer low-energy periods. You will crave processed food more frequently and in greater quantities than raw food.
The real issue with processed foods tends to be that their goal is isolating the tasty by removing the healthy. If you actually set up the correct goals, then there is no particular reason why "natural foods" could not have their effects artificially replicated or improved upon.
1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-can-a-pe...
Though they do address things like blood sugar in similar articles: https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/212769503-Glycemic...
Of course it's not perfect. Could you do better by meticulously cataloging your intake, painstakingly measuring everything you cook, and going the extra mile to determine the exact source of all your food? Yeah probably. My time is worth more to me than that. I would rather waste my time on things other than making sure I am perfectly nourished.
How long had humans gone eating crude bread, grilled meat, and stuff they found on the ground? Now we have processing techniques more advanced than 'Make it hot' and we live longer now than ever before.
At least Soylent, as a company, is very up-front with their goals and concerns. They just sent me a message telling me not to eat the Soylent Bars I bought (Jokes on them I already threw them out because they are gross)
Also, Unless you eat the core and the seeds I think an apple and the quantity of apple juice you can make by squeezing one apple are probably going to be digested in a similar fashion. I get your point, I just don't think that is a good example.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/07/24/3549931.ht...
>.. but they are inherently worse and less healthy than less-processed foods (generally)
this is such a stupid oversimplification that any amount of critical thinking can debunk it.
Lots of food is only considered edible once it's been processed. Look at wheat. Without the great length we go to mill flour, it's completely indigestible.
I think the Apple Juice example is a poor one, as it takes many apples to make one serving of apple juice, and you're leaving out the pulp, etc. This is exactly what we are talking about when we say that the composition matters, not how processed it is. You have to care what the process is, not just that its "processed".
Do they know why their bars are making people sick, yet? What more subtle issues (contamination or formulaic deficiency) could be lurking, now, or in the future? It's clearly a risk, even with a lot of engineering know-how, especially this early in the game.
Do people complain that showers are meant to displace baths?
They did when showers first started replacing baths in the 1800's.
>Soylent is a simple, efficient and affordable food that possesses what a body needs to be healthy. Soylent is a new option for maintaining a balanced state of ideal nutrition, just like traditional food.
Source: https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/212767043-What-is-...
The real mistake here is the implication that everyone who consumes Soylent replaces 100% of their meals with it. That isn't the use case, and this has been explained many times. Soylent serves a specific purpose, just like astronaut ice cream, Tang, and TV dinners. The author says: "no one in their right mind would chose [astronaut ice cream] over the cold, creamy stuff on a hot day," but he's wrong. Many people did for the novelty, and many people prefer Soylent for its convenience.
The real soylent sickness isn't replacing locally sourced, farm-to-table food with disgusting "food", as the author claims. The real soylent sickness is the culture of "meals are just input so I can keep working".
I don't really care about food but I gotta eat it to do stuff I enjoy. Soylent helps out in that case because it fills me up, is healthy, and is quick.
I already have my nice dinner with girlfriend once a day, not every meal has to be like that. I'm not sure why anti-Soylent people believe Soylent users only drink Soylent.
i honestly feels like people forgot that there's more to life than working or making money or disrupting an industry. go lay down on a park and watch the sunset for goodness sake, it's good for you!
(in my case, i 1000% love cooking. it's a whole experience, even if it's just for me. cooking for myself is "me time", when i do things for myself, so i can enjoy)
If only there was some convenient food you could pack with you that takes no time to prepare, little time to consume, and is easily transportable...
i specifically chose a job that allows me to enjoy my life and my family.
> If only there was some convenient food you could pack with you that takes no time to prepare, little time to consume, and is easily transportable...
like sandwich? it takes me 10min to prepare a really tasty BLT that i can take anywhere.
Even in "naturally grown regular foods", the field is still pretty young and we can barely make good recommendations for those. They just happen to be what we eat and as long as they're not crazy processed, we have a few thousand years of experience with them not necessarily killing us immediately.
Areas of research like Metabolomics or Proteomics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omics) are still in their infancy, so while Soylent does mix a bunch of ingredients that all fall into the right areas, the long term effects are basically unknown. And that doesn't even take personalized medicine into consideration where your gene markup might actually have a lot to do with what might or might not be good for your personally.
Again, I don't have any insight besides some armchair quarterback knowledge about nutrition, but it seems like most people that do don't think it's a particularly great idea to eat it more than 'every now and then'.
That being said, when compared to twinkies and sugary sodas it might still be better for you. Having it as part of a daily diet though might not be a good idea.
If you don't think it will work, you don't have to eat it. I'll keep eating Soylent (or whatever the current best whole-food is) every day and get back to you from my deathbed (to let you know if I blame Soylent)
Might?
Like you hinted, this all seems like a valid argument to be made against any given modern diet. I can't imagine that even the most careful and educated person alive is eating meals that resemble what our ancestors had experience with for thousands of years.
So we can't necessarily rely on that, and we're waiting on feedback from fields you claim are in their infancy. It could be that a long-term soylent diet turns out to make you infertile, or that it repairs your body 1.5 times faster. I bet that the truth is probably somewhere closer to neutral, and I don't think that's as crazy a risk as you're making it out to be.
If you also think that since we know so little about nutrition most of us should revert to eating exclusively meat and vegetables until further research is conducted because we started harvesting grains and potatoes off absolutely no research, then I think your argument is consistent. But otherwise your argument is, "we don't know much, but I like rice and my friends think Soylent is bad for you".
Not knowing much about nutrition doesn't make you unintelligent, but running around implying that something's a bad idea when you don't know what you're talking about is foolish at best and harmful at worst.
That said, I think the idea of a single optimal meal replacement is fundamentally flawed. Our understanding of nutrition and metabolism is still very rudimentary. My opinion is that it's dangerous to move away from whole foods today, not because of some natural food fallacy, but simply because we don't know everything that's going on with digestive and nutritional health. It may very well be the case that no single food is optimal to eat all the time, and that the body needs different rhythms of food intake over time to create baseline stresses for the organism to respond to metabolically.
Now here's why I disagree with this article so much: Besides programming, I'm an award winning BBQ chef that's cooking for a local food truck and soon a brick-and-mortar location. I am _very_ familiar with spending a lot of time on food. A longer cook might take 13 or 14 hours. I do this every week. And I _love_ that.
Understanding and enjoying the value of Soylent isn't an either/or thing. I love cooking at home, I spend lots of time in front of an oven or a smoker. I also appreciate Soylent as a healthy and inexpensive way to keep myself nourished when I don't want to think about food.
I wonder why the author would write this article without even making an attempt to understand how real people, not his hypothetical straw-man of a Soylent consumer, use the product.
That article wouldn't generate as many clicks :/
What?
> Remember that stuff? It was developed as part of the space program in the nineteen-sixties, and you bought it in the sort of science stores that were toy stores for nerds. It was sweet. It came in ice-cream flavors. But it 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.
Soylent isn’t a simulation of food. I’m pretty sure it explicitly chooses not to simulate food. And people are choosing to eat it.
As others have said, speak for yourself.
Have they even read the ingredients list of soylent? It just has the basic macros, vitamins and minerals. It's less new age superfood than fortified flour.
> that is fundamentally the opposite of the way we increasingly want to eat in America
That's for the market to decide, not you, little New Yorker writer.
> When you look at the recent arc of food culture, the most significant food movement is the purposeful pushback against the postwar industrial food system
Funny, I thought the main trend was the death of family farms at the hands of Smithfield, Tyson et al.
The real sickness is modern animal agriculture, the rest is a rounding error in comparison.
I'm also a hedonistic participant in the "recent arc of food culture" that embraces locally grown ingredients prepared lovingly by chefs with a creative vision. Gramercy Tavern, the New York restaurant that most embodies this recent arc, takes a bite out of my paycheck multiple times a month.
But what the New Yorker assumes is that this kind of food, and the time and money to consume it is equally available to everyone at all times. That is absolutely not the case.
There are three key demographics for Soylent in my mind:
1. The efficiency obsessed engineer who will use Soylent as a primary food source.
2. Someone who has limited access to nutritious food due to geography or income and frequently prefers Soylent to the alternatives.
3. Someone who has the income and ability to enjoy well-prepared meals, and does so frequent,ly but occasionally finds themself unable to do so because of time or geography.
I'm in the last camp as are a number of my friends. Not enough time to get a proper breakfast - Soylent/Coffiest. Commuting to a client office for lunch and no good options nearby - Soylent. It is possible to make those choices and then enjoy a dinner where you relish the flavor and texture of the tomatillos in your salad.
4. Does not really enjoy eating food.
Spending time/money/energy on good food is completely pointless for some people (e.g. friend with anosmia).
The bad press comes from the handful(?) of people who will tell anyone who will listen that their work is too important to do mundane things like cooking a meal.
"When you look at the recent arc of food culture, the most significant food movement is the purposeful pushback against the postwar industrial food system, a system that was the food futurism of its day. This industry brought us preservatives, Wonder Bread, Tang, and microwavable frozen TV dinners. It lowered the price of food tremendously and increased convenience in innumerable ways, but it also made us fatter and sicker, and robbed our meals of their original flavors,replacing them with addictive but unhealthy substances."
I think this is only true if you are upper middle class or above.
If you're looking for higher /quality control/ Kosher might be a good term to look for.
I know that when I buy ketchup I just go for the 'simple' variants, the ones that use the more traditional recipe and thus avoid HFCS (which I get too much of from other sources).
Meh. Kosher slaughtering forbids the use of stunning (or otherwise incapaciting) an animal before slaughtering, so you're trading quality for animal cruelty in my opinion.
Edit: looks like at least some Islamic communities allow for stunning the animal prior to slaughter in order to qualify as "halal" meat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhabihah#Stunning). Depending on how many Jewish vs Muslim markets you have access to, a Muslim supermarket might be the better choice then.
In other words -- taste and smell (and texture, and the overall pleasure-centric aspects of the eating experience) matter a lot. And the primates over at companies like Soylent would have to be very cocky to think they throw all of that to the side, and replace it with a chemical formula or two.
So either you want to listen to nutrition experts or you don't. You can't have it both ways.
I am aware of one controlled diet study--I think it was from the 1960s--where the participants were fed a semi-liquid diet which contained all the chemical components of what was then suspected to be complete human nutrition. The results could not be used, because too many of the subjects quit, or ate foods smuggled in from outside.
Knowing of that study, I have never feared that anyone would suffer some deficiency disease from eating nothing but Soylent. Because I think no one could accomplish such a feat for a long enough duration for any symptom to appear. I guarantee that unless the person is strapped down to a table for 23 hours a day and violently kept away from edible items for the 24th, they are, in fact, eating other things besides just Soylent from time to time.
So when nutritionists recommend against eating Soylent as a replacement for food, I have to wonder why they even think that is even plausible enough to say anything about it.
I understand completely why Cypher from The Matrix would sell out all of humanity for some virtual medium-rare tenderloin, instead of the nutrient slurry they have no choice about eating in the real world.
But more practically: if a nutrition expert can point to hard scientific evidence that Soylent is missing something specific, then it can be added. If they can't, then they are just talking out of their ass.
Soylent is based in Los Angeles.
Soylent is a great option to have when you want it. Slowly enjoying traditional food is still very nice. It's going to be OK.
That's how Soylent marketed it before and during the kickstarter.
I believe it's a worthwhile subject, simply illustrated by the article. The overwhelming "The author doesn't get the point of Soylent" reaction here tells me that most people actually don't get the gist of the article itself: it's not about Soylent in particular, it's about (food) disruption.
Our culture is full of manufactured food that doesn't even attempt to provide nutrition. While it would be lovely if we could all eat out of our own private gardens and vineyards, something like soylent seems like a step in the right direction.
The absolutely (and rightly) did blame modern beef production methods for this. It is one of the reasons that EU beef is better quality than US beef today.
Nope, it's none of those: it's because I watch movies. Lots of movies. And I live in a house with people who watch more movies than I do. So whenever I hear the name "Soylent" there's a nagging voice in the back of my head:
it's people, isn't it?
Seriously, they need to change the name.
0. The author doesn't bother to try a sip of soylent, but feels empowered to judge its flavor based on the opinions of other reviewers. This itself is meaningless, but it's representative of the amount of original thought in the rest of the article.
1. Implying the recall is due to reckless startup culture with no evidence and ignoring recalls from traditional players.
2. Telling people their every meal must be heirloom, artisan, and slowly eaten reeks of aspirational privilege. Has the author never grabbed a burger running late to a party? Can he really afford nothing but the finest ingredients on a writer's salary?
3. Most of the arguments are generic anti industrialized food and have nothing to do with contemporary food startups. Not only is soylent a reaction against those artificially flavored and unhealthy products from long established companies, it completely ignores startups like blue apron that promote slower food.