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Comment by Afforess | Hacker News Reader

Not terribly novel or interesting; the article entirely ignores that Soylent culture is driven by a disinterest in cooking and a desire to avoid the time spent during food preparation, cleanup, grocery shopping, etc.

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.

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Eggs keep for months just fine.

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.

In the US it's not advised to keep eggs that long, which speaks to a whole other issue.

In the US, eggs are prepared for consumer sales differently. Most notably, the cuticle is removed.

If you sterilize the shells and dip them in mineral oil or cheese wax, they can be kept at room temperature for much longer.

If you keep bread in the fridge, it'll keep for quite awhile & be available to eat (unlike freezing it).

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.

On my experience, bread spoils faster in the fridge. By the way, scientists still cannot describe chemical reactions in bread staleness. Contrary to popular belief, staleness is not really dryness, it's a complex chemical process.

Great point, suburban supermarkets do seem to be very bulk oriented.

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)

> 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.

http://www.thatrecipe.com/blog/2014/03/06/daniel-tiger-banan...

> bread/buns before they grow stale or mold.

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.

Sourdough already lasts for a while and freezes quite nicely. Works out great for grilled cheese.

These cheese bags will make your cheese last drastically longer. Plastic wrap condensation makes mold happen much faster. I buy Costco blocks of sharp cheddar and finish them myself, though I'll admit a certain fondness of cheese.

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.

But isn't Soylent the ultimate "same meal over and over"?

The same meal over and over does not sound appealing to anyone I think. Even I would not want to eat pizza 7 days a week.

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.

> The same meal over and over does not sound appealing to anyone I think. Even I would not want to eat pizza 7 days a week.

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...

Somehow the same meal of neutral-tasing Soylent is more appealing than the same meal of some prepared food.

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).

I did soylent for a bit but reverted back to eating out for the majority of my meals. Theirs a lot of ways to mix soylent to mix up the flavor, my personal favorite was peanut butter, milk, and chocolate protein powder, that do a little bit to mix hinder the monotony.

I agree. I'll never understand how people get so defensive in regards to SOMEONE ELSE's decision to change their diet. Soylent is a great solution for some. It's not for everyone (nothing is, not even food :P) - and I'm glad it works.

You may be interested to learn about freezing foods.

Freezing means you then have to thaw them, which is a process in and of itself - which sucks if the goal is to reduce food planning/prep time.

Besides, most people's freezers aren't big enough to store an entire grocery shopping's worth of goods.

I've been freezing for the past several months and in practice thawing just means "Set the mac and cheese/chicken fingers/chili in the fridge so it's ready tomorrow". I have about half a months worth of meals for 2 in the freezer, plus some months worth in a deep freeze in the garage. Prep and planning isn't reduced that much except for overhead like driving to/from the store, most of it is just shifted to one big cooking night.

You seem convinced that subsisting on Soylent is the best idea. What about minimal preparation of meals + freezer bags + sous vide? That way you really don't have to worry about thawing. And prepping things like cuts of steak is really just salt/pepper/buttering it before freezing.

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."

>>You seem convinced that subsisting on Soylent is the best idea

I never said that.

Lactose free milk lasts about 6 weeks, or about 3 times longer. It costs about 25% more, but it's totally worth it.

We buy 1.5 gallons at Costco for the two of us and never had it go bad.

I can confirm that lactose free milk never seems to go bad. And I don't know what the situation is in other cities, but in Seattle, it's ubiquitous, and it's not even specialized brands (e.g. Lactaid) any more.

Yeah here in the Bay Area there are multiple store brands that have lactose free, and they are almost all cheaper than Lactaid (although Lactaid seems to go on sale here a lot bringing it in line with the store brands).

I had noticed that as well. I wonder if it's because the lactose contributes to the process that makes it go bad, or because they treat it to make it last longer assuming it will move slower with a limited consumer base.

...

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-...

A lot of organic milk is like this too. They pasteurize it differently because it sells more slowly.

Maybe they'll come out with a new version that actually has flavor? Maybe even a little rebranding?

https://breakingbelgium.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/bachelor...

Flavor isn't the end-all be-all goal of food. I regularly drink soylent, and I could care less that it is basically tasteless. I drink it because it's cheap and takes ~15 seconds to open and finish. No grocery shopping for it, no cooking/meal prep required. When I'm eating alone, that is all I care about.

What's the current cost per meal of Soylent?

$2.69 per 400 kcal. bottle

Powder is the cheapest option, which comes out to $1.93 per 500 kcal

Depends on what you consider a "meal."

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".

"Here is the computer calculated quantity of tasteless nutrient sludge necessary to maintain your productivity for the day" could very well be the first line out of a dystopian novel somewhere.

>new version that actually has flavor?

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.

Grocery shopping for one is frustrating...

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.

Your solution seems to be invest more time into learning how to grocery shop and prep food better, which supports the OPs argument that it is a real investment to make. Whereas the whole point of Soylent is the chance to skip this whole time investment and optimization process.

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.

Whereas the whole point of Soylent is the chance to skip this whole time investment and optimization process.

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.

Conflating meal replacement products with junk food is silly. They accomplish entirely different goals.

That's the thing -- they're trying to convince people that their product is a "meal replacement". In the same way that caffeine and other stimulates are de-facto "sleep replacements" (and alcohol, a de-facto "self-esteem replacement") for many people. And indeed, most highly processed foods (a.k.a. "junk foods") have been successfully positioned as "replacements" for ... foods that actually come from farms, small bakeries and dairies, and so forth.

But whether any of these actually are viable "replacements" (considering long-term health and other side effects) is again very much open to question.

I think the idea of Soylent as a replacement for food is almost like an uncanny valley type affect for most people.

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.

(Was there anything wrong with being single?)

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.

And I honestly doubt that anyone here or most places has an issue with Soylent as start-your-day food. After all, smoothies (often with all sorts of questionable "powerfood" additives) are a big thing these days. The hackles come up when it's promoted or discussed as a broader meal replacement.

And I honestly doubt that anyone here or most places has an issue with Soylent as start-your-day food.

"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.

The standard counter to Soylent criticism though is that it's just an alternative to other quick meals on the go. Personally, I do often make smoothies in the morning and have never had a Soylent so I'm not going to argue against more natural is healthier--even if I'm not going to try to substantiate that general preference scientifically.

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.

> forever spoil cheese and milk

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.

In the US here. I bought milk a week ago that expires on Nov. 26th. Nearly every gallon I buy is good for at least 1.5 months. I don't buy the cheap store-brand gallon jug. I buy the nearly-cheap organic store-brand milk cartons.

It lasts as about the same. You can get the UHT most places i've been to, but it is not particular popular. The problem is more about purchasable quantity. 1/2 gallon (~2 liters) is the smallest "normal" size for Milk, you can definitely buy pints, and liters as well. The cost-per-unit definitely goes up below 1/2 gallon.

It is the same quality as you get in the EU. Milk lasts a week or so in the US as well. UHT is mostly unheard of in the US because people actually like the taste of milk... ;)

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.

Cheddar, hah I think you mean 'merican cheese

Ya got me. I was going to say "Kraft Velveeta (tm) cheese food product" but thought I might have been pushing it. ;)

Cheddar is a village in Somerset in Britain :)

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.

As a single, and lactose-intolerant, person, I've tend to search out milk that lasts a bit longer than one week, but I've still thrown quite a bit away.

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.

"I still have not found any reliable way of buying small enough quantities of bread/buns before they grow stale or mold."

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

I think the article actually does highlight a valid growing trend away from industrial processed foods and towards getting closer to the source for natural foods.

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.

Does US not have UHT milk? I buy 24 or even 48 cartons at costco and I'm sorted for milk for a very long time.

It's one of these foodstuffs where I'm pretty sure I can taste the difference when I get it fresh. And at a liter for 50cents, I really don't care about any savings in bulk.

It is very uncommon in the US, though available (however I rarely see large tetrapacs of it, generally just single-serving boxes).

Bread is super annoying in this regard. I eat a single slice every morning for breakfast, which means I can't go through a whole loaf before it starts getting moldy, or at least stale.

Freeze it. If you eat toast in the morning you can toast from frozen.

Bread remains fresh longer if you slice it on demand rather than in advance. Keep it resting on the sliced side for maximal freshness.

If you go to a supermarket where they bake bread, and they have whole loafs of in-store baked bread, they'll often be happy to sell you a half-loaf. Just take it to the bakery counter and ask if you can buy half the loaf.

Yep, Whole Foods does half-loaves.

Bread freezes very well. It also thaws out really quickly. Or you can just stick the frozen slice in the toaster.

Then maybe double it and eat 2 slices; problem solved.

That seems to be a very American problem. Portions of everything are just HUGE there, compared with other countries where there are more reasonable sized packages for a single person.

> disinterest in cooking and a desire to avoid the time spent during food preparation

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.

> You say this like it's a feature not a bug.

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).

Yes, it is a feature for some people; they simply don't like cooking and don't want to spend time on it.

No, people who don't like cooking let other people cook for them and go out to eat or have food delivered. Soylent is for people who do not like to eat food. Big difference.

No, I don't think you can generalize like that. I like eating just fine, but I would consider Soylent if I wasn't married mostly because I just don't like cooking. Going out or ordering isn't financially all that feasible, whereas Soylent actually could be.

I don't think it has to be so black and white. There's room for a variety of small preferences to cause a person to choose one thing over another.

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.

Is grocery shopping a valuable skill? Is it bad to avoid cooking? Do these questions have only one right answer that works for everyone?

>You say this like it's a feature not a bug.

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.

Do you discriminate equally against those that eat out often in order to avoid the same activities?

Try going to a convenience store or drugstore. You probably won't find 6 eggs but you probably will find quarts of milk.

I'm really surprised, can't you buy half dozen eggs, 200 gr butter or 100 gr ham in an US supermarket?

You might have an easier time finding that in a market, or corner store, than a supermarket, but you might not find everything you are looking for, and it might all be a bit more expensive than a supermarket. Depending on how many placed you go to show (taking more time), buying smaller portions at smaller stores may end up taking more time and cost close to the same amount as the larger portion. There's not a lot of incentive in that besides not being wasteful.

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. ;)

Then it is different than here in Spain (or in France an Italy), in every supermarket you can find half or a dozen eggs packs and the smaller butter pack is 4.4 ounces.

I've never seen half dozen egg cartons or single sticks of butter sold in supermarkets, but my experience is somewhat limited. Eggs and butter last for a while so I don't think this is really a big deal. And you can generally get as much meat as you want in the deli/butcher section of a supermarket.

>I've never seen half dozen egg cartons or single sticks of butter sold in supermarkets, but my experience is somewhat limited.

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.

Yes, OP does not relate to my experiences at all. If there is one thing the US has no issues in it is consumer choice / variety. The only thing frustrating about grocery shopping for me is that I have to do it so often since I go through my ingredients so quickly.

Soylent, on the other hand, has a shelf-life of 1 year.

With a taste and mouth-feel to match. Bon appetit!

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