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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

I'm really amazed by all the supporters on here. When I first heard about Soylent, I thought it was a terrible terrible idea. I mean, there's so much to food. It's not just eating it, it's all the flavours and ingredients and cooking with friends and loved ones and parties and such. I'm guessing most people on here use it as a supplement + regular food, but when I saw it originally, it seemed like it was intended to be someone's only source of food.

I think I'll just stick to Quest bars when I'm too busy to eat right. :-P

View on HN

Every time Soylent is on HN people say this.

Why don't people understand? It's so simple: Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need. It's not a) the ONLY food you can eat or b) supposed to replace all meals.

I order a box of Soylent bottles every few weeks—they come in handy while working or for a quick breakfast or if I have little time and am hungry. I also cook meals with my girlfriend a few times a week and go out to dinner every weekend. Both things can exist at the same time.

It's just a nutritious drink you can drink at any time if you need to. If you want to make it most of our meals, sure go ahead. But no one says you must.

> Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need

This is the problem. That concept is completely foreign to a lot of people (me included). The combination of my body's needs and the way I was raised lead me to view each meal as an opportunity to be enjoyed, never a chore.

Something I observed in the weightlifting community: there are people who need to worry about dieting (cutting) and people who worry about eating enough (bulking). Serious weightlifters go through cycles of both but most people struggle more with one side or another.

Bulking isn't a struggle for me -- I can clear 5,000 kcal/day without a sweat. I've trained myself to eat pretty healthy but I'd always prefer steak and eggs for breakfast. On the other hand, a friend of mine complains about all the pizza he has to eat to meet his targets. Soylent makes a lot of sense for him (quick calories) but I'll never understand that feeling of "ugh, I need to eat, guess I'll have a Soylent".

> but I'll never understand that feeling of "ugh, I need to eat, guess I'll have a Soylent".

It sounds like you have either more free time or a more a steady work schedule then their target user.

I have all the free time in the world and I have that "ugh do I really need to eat again?"

I find it hard to hit 2500 calories daily to not lose weight.

Replace all water with whole milk - problem solved!

Honestly, what the other poster said: whole milk.

2400 calories per gallon, well balanced between protein, fat, and carbs (you might say that it is ideally formulated to feed large mammals :P). The best part is that it is readily available every where and super cheap (< $3 per gallon).

Why not shouldn't instead of whole milk?

Even better: custard. Straight from the box.

65%-90% of humans are lactose intolerant[0], and lactaid pills aren't always effective.

https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/lactose-intolerance#statis...

I'm guessing that ratio is probably different for people on HN, since, as fluent English speakers, they're more likely to be descended from Europeans.

It is, but it's still significant. 13% for whites in the US but rising to near 90% for some ethnic groups.

Europe varies greatly, with by far the highest level of tolerance in Northern Europe (I'm Norwegian, and I didn't even know about lactose intolerance until I was in the 20's - it just wasn't something that became a subject until we were exposed to more immigrants as while it existed in Norway before that it was <5%), with lactose intolerance increasing to well above 20% in many other European countris.

In any case the advice to down vast quantities as milk isn't universally applicable anywhere.

I would be very surprised if HN didn't also a large number of people of Asian descent who are much less likely to tolerate lactose.

That is not a careful reading of the statistics given.

The full quote:

"Approximately 65 percent of the human population has a reduced ability to digest lactose after infancy. Lactose intolerance in adulthood is most prevalent in people of East Asian descent, affecting more than 90 percent of adults in some of these communities. Lactose intolerance is also very common in people of West African, Arab, Jewish, Greek, and Italian descent."

Lactose free milk (ehich is different than taking lactase pigs with milk) is a readily available thing.

I've dropped the idea that IGF response is something I need in my life. Milk is ideally formulated to feed babies that need to grow into gigantic beasts.

It is also a very inferior product made with zero genetic engineering. Just silly crossbreeding until the cow has big enough milk gains.

Don't see how it's, from a nutritional or health perspective, superior to Soylent.

Milk is also super cheap because it's heavily subsidized through taxes. I'm not saving idiot entrepreneurs by buying their unsustainable products.

So you prefer a diet engineered by humans (who, with our rather limited understanding of nutrition, can't even decide on whether carbs are a good thing) to a diet engineered and field tested by evolution over millions of years? Not the bet I would make, but to each their own, I guess.

Several other points:

1. The OP was remarking that they had a hard time maintaining weight. Anybody who has done GOMAD (gallon of milk a day) can tell you that large quantities of milk will head off the possibility of weight loss.

2. Is there any reason to believe that the agricultural inputs to something like Soylent aren't just as heavily subsidized as you claim milk to be?

Never said I consider a Soylent only diet proper. I have no opinion on that.

Milk is in our diet for several thousand years, not millions.

1. There's also a lot of people who ate balanced meals and kept weight. Drinking that much milk has some unwanted stuff in it - like IGF-I - which can cause cancer in those huge amounts.

2. Maybe soy, but that's a side-effect of the dairy that uses it not for the sake of human consumption. But it's highly likely the soy used is the one for human consumption, which would remove the necessary subsidies.

Somehow this seems like an American thing or maybe people in other places make less of a spectacle of it?

Always having too little time, always working and being proud to plan every minute of every day (recently Marissa Mayer and Bill Gates and someone else from the US said in interviews they have every minute of every day planned; sounds like pure hell but he) seems very American. This Soylent thing fits in there.

Why would someone want to work that much unless you want to become a billionaire which, again, seems a drive in media coming from the US?

Maybe it is just the media I read though, but here there is no vibe like that and when I meet (very successful/rich) entrepreneurs in Asia/Aus/EU they seem to be always eating elaborately so they do not give of that vibe either. Again the press distorts but posts here on HN and a thing like Soylent support that press.

> Somehow this seems like an American thing or maybe people in other places make less of a spectacle of it?

I think there is more acceptance in certain cultures, for example, to skip lunch because it's a busy day. Having worked globally and in multiple industries, I don't believe it's an American only thing although probably more common there. I see it as more of an industry thing, and each industry seems to have it's own use case for a product like Soylent. i.e. the programmer 'in the zone' and not wanting to stop for dinner or the investment banker running on a few hours of sleep due to an upcoming pitch.

> Always having too little time, always working and being proud to plan every minute of every day

I'm not sure how that was implied, but that does not represent the typical American workforce in my view.

> entrepreneurs in Asia/Aus/EU they seem to be always eating elaborately

I would be surprised to hear these types of individuals don't deal with skipped meals or lack of time based on what's going on in there life/work like their counterparts in other countries do.

> I'm not sure how that was implied,

People here imply that people consume Soylent either because they cannot get enough calories in with normal food to not lose weight (what a luxury that must be), or, in most cases and as the direct parent writes, that they do not have time to eat 'normally'. That seems to mesh with the whole culture of fast food and minute day planning; I for one could not tell you if I have time for an elaborate meal or a quick meal at lunch today and I would not want to know if I do either. I'll see what happens when I get hungry.

> but that does not represent the typical American workforce in my view.

Not typical workforce; I'm citing some famous and very rich US business people. Just noting that these people seem proud of it while I don't hear the same stories (in the press) from anywhere else. And others (especially on HN) seem desperate to copy it (which is, I assume, were Soylent came from in the first place); people who cite this (time-hacking/life-hacking/whatever-hacking it is called) as a great feat are all from (=living in currently) the US when I check their profiles.

It's an old tradition, too: there are accounts from the early days of the United States talking about how reading is treated as labor rather than the enjoyable affairs which visitors from England, France, etc. were accustomed to.

https://books.google.com/books?id=2uBEAAAAIAAJ&lpg=PA44&ots=...

Particularly when you are inundated in valley slave culture, being busy all the time is a sign of your importance - you're busy disrupting the market getting ready to IPO, and if you have 10 spare minutes a day in which to regain some semblance of health or sanity, clearly you aren't a 10x developer. It's absolute hogwash and sadly a good number of brilliant young engineers are going to burn out, suffer health consequences, quit the field, etc. over it.

But having employees willing to sacrifice their actual wellbeing for the pipe-dream of getting "rich" is quite beneficial if you're say, a VC, so of course they foster this culture. "Look at how busy you are, you must be doing such important work!"

Think of something you have to do every day that you don't like to do. Like flossing maybe? Some people really enjoy flossing. Some people don't. If there were a device I could put in my mouth and in 30 seconds everything were flossed, I would totally do that. But some people would think, man how can you do that and take all the enjoyment out of flossing?

Sometimes when I'm working, I run to the fridge, grab whatever is in it and eat it while I keep working. It usually doesn't taste like anything because I don't even bother heating it.

Soylent lets me do that but it's a lot healthier than whatever leftovers I might grab out of the fridge.

Either way I'm not enjoying the food nor the company (I'm at my desk at home alone). I'm also only spending 10 minutes.

"If there were a device I could put in my mouth and in 30 seconds everything were flossed"... I think what you're looking for is dental floss.

If it takes you less than a minute to floss you're probably doing it wrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PreNWWOYfI#t=32s

Eh, flossing is a placebo anyway.

I can't attest to whether it helps prevent cavities or gum disease or whatever, given regular dental visits. I can say though that I used to rarely floss, and since I started flossing daily a few years ago, my teeth remain noticeably smoother and cleaner feeling between dentist visits, and require considerably less scraping when I'm there.

I don't know about you but I can tell how important flossing is by the amount of blood that comes out of my mouth the longer I take a break from flossing

With a little bit of practice you can easily do it as demonstrated there in under a minute.

I think you mean https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRivxlG8Bmc#t=25s

Some people's teeth are so messed up that flossing is a puzzle. "Right angle there, diagonal between those two teeth, curve a bit there, go backward there"...

Actually what you're looking for would be a waterflosser. The trick is not forcing yourself to use it, it's not getting addicted to it.

When I've looked into waterflossers the evidence wasn't strong that they actually work. Then again, neither is it for flossing at all.

It's one of those things you have to try for yourself, I think. The evidence in my case is very much apparent when I'm in the chair getting poked by my hygienist. The waterflosser is more effective at maintaining my gum health than floss ever was, with a p-value amounting to a floating-point denormal.

I have a feeling that if the truth were to come out, the effectiveness of flossing would turn out to be entirely dependent on tooth spacing or some other individual characteristic. If so, that may be true for the waterjet gadgets as well. But it seems less likely.

That's exactly the alien part, I think. Equating eating to flossing is utterly alien to me. Every meal is a positive thing.

From people on the other side: sometimes I'm like "ugh, even drinking smth seems too much distraction, don't wanna loose this focus now, an IV-cathether port that could just pump the right stuff into my veins, triggered automatically by sensors knowing my dietary intake history and pooling blood concentrations of things from me, would be so awesome now" :)

Also, deciding what to eat is a huge chore and mental energy drain for me... especially since I like constant diversity and novelty even in food. If I could afford to have a personal chef that would be trained to "always surprise me" and occasionally I could just tell him smth like "uhm, that salad looks delicious, but I'm too lazy to eat it, grind it up into a shake please so I can slurp it on my way to place X or while coding" it would rock!

You like diverse food but then resort to Soylent to avoid choosing food? I suppose it's healthier than McD but it really sounds a bit crazy.

> Some people really enjoy flossing.

Who does exactly?

Food, to me, represents more than replenishment of nutrition. It represents meeting and understanding my coworkers. Learning more about my significant other or unwinding with this person to talk about our week. Even when it's not a social situation, for me it's a treat. I completed some work and now I should treat myself by revitalizing my body with a substance that tastes good. It's a great motivator.

It's such a fundamental part of being a human being I can't at all relate to seeing it as a mechanical process such as flossing. I can't think of a worse comparison: when you're flossing, you're alone, and if anything anti social. Eating couldn't be any more be the opposite. It's something that all humans can relate to and bond over no matter what your opinions are.

Flossing isn't a part of our culture. Food is a part of every culture.

>> Some people really enjoy flossing.

> Who does exactly?

I do! Admittedly anecdotal. I am not afraid to confess that I enjoy flossing.

That we can all relate to it and bond over it doesn't mean that all of us want to. If I feel like being social, fine. But most of the time I don't feel like being social. Often that's the case even when I want to relax and enjoy food - I'd say maybe 3/4 of the time I go to restaurants I go alone by choice.

But just like I can, and occasionally do, enjoy social interactions but usually prefer solitude, while I can, and do often, greatly enjoy food there are still plenty of time when hunger is just an annoying disruption.

All of the stuff that you have built up around food can exist just fine separate from it. You connecting socialising and bonding with food is just habit. That's fine, but it isn't universal.

It might be very important for your, but not for me. People have different taste.

> Eating couldn't be any more be the opposite. It's something that all humans can relate to and bond over no matter what your opinions are.

I generally don't like food. Sometimes I crave something specific, or want to eat at a nice place. But 6 out of 7 days out of the week, food just isn't appealing to me, and is a chore to eat. It's basically like flossing.

Ever since a time when I was a teen and had to fast because of an esophagus problem, I haven't really felt hunger the same way. It's possible for me to go a few days without eating and not notice it or feel hungry. I can tell when I'm very hungry because I get lightheaded and weak around day 3. (Note, I don't do this intentionally and it isn't often I go days without eating).

So Soylent (or equivalent) is really helpful in making sure I get some food everyday.

> It's such a fundamental part of being a human being I can't at all relate to seeing it as a mechanical process such as flossing

I mean, I agree with you and everything but you're saying "this thing is so important to me I cannot understand other people". There are a reasonably large number of people who would be very happy if they only ever ate a bowl of cereal and a banana for breakfast every single day for the rest of their life. I don't understand it, and I wouldn't like it, but I don't want to prevent them the comfort they get from that.

Is it really so difficult to make a sandwich?

It is very easy to make a sandwich once you have a fridge which fills itself with fresh ingredients whenever you run out.

Also your sandwich is predominantly going to be made up of bread, even the healthiest of which isn't all that healthy, and likely deli meat, which you probably don't want to much of either.

Not with sudo.

Though I'd argue the healthier alternative would be to take a break and go walk to a nice restaurant somewhere, but alas I also fall into situations where you just need to keep on task.

Usually keeping a break is better for both your health and your work

yup. when went from working 14h/day (with almost no breaks) to working 7~8h (with breaks to eat, drink water, walk around), my productivity increased a lot.

Is it healthier? Apparently it's making people sick.

I have two young kids and a startup. The idea that I should view each meal as an opportunity to be enjoyed is honestly a pipe dream right now. I enjoy as many of my meals as I can with my family. But when the kids are sick or I'm running behind and have a meeting, I grab a soylent and I feel like it's a lot healthier than picking up sugary junk or other alternatives.

I have one kid, and no startup, and sometimes the only meal I get to enjoy is lunch at the office.

When going out to eat, I would hold my son in my left hand, as I shoveled food into my mouth with my right hand, taking a break to apologize to whomever was dining with me for having such bad manners.

Soylent has nine grams of sugar per serving. It is sugary junk.

Isn’t it supposed to be a meal or something? Nine grams isn’t that much compared to e.g. a muffin (~30 g).

A muffin is not a meal though. A juicy steak with a side of grilled vegetables has ~0g sugar.

I tried that. I got sick after I eat a juicy steak that I put in the trunk of my car last week.

Did it sit in the trunk of your car for an extended period of time?

From the earlier comment:

> But when the kids are sick or I'm running behind and have a meeting, I grab a soylent and I feel like it's a lot healthier than picking up sugary junk or other alternatives.

It's not about general meals. It's those situations where you aren't able to make a real meal and have to settle on either nothing, or something fast and convenient. A muffin can be grabbed and eaten immediately. I'm not really sure how you expect them to grill a steak and vegetables.

Isn't the WHO recommended sugar intake ~25 grams? 3 meals at 9 grams each is pretty close to that.

3 Soylent drinks is 1200 calories. You're talking five to hit 2000 calories in a day.

(And it's 34 total net carbohydrates per bottle, with 3g fiber. Which isn't great, either.)

It has 9g of Isomaltulose. It's a sugar, but it's not as bad as table sugar or HFCS for your blood sugar levels.

So yes, it's not perfect, but it's better than it sounds.

9g of sugar for an entire meal isn't that much. A bottle of Coca-Cola has 67.5g of sugar in it, for comparison. An Apple has 19g.

Your expectations of how much sugar people should eat are set unrealistically low.

I average about 30g of carbohydrate and under 5g sugar for an entire day when I'm losing or maintaining my weight. 9g for a small meal (and Soylent is a small meal, it's 400 calories a bottle) is a lot, especially given that it's 34g of non-fiber carbohydrates in the bottle besides jst the sugar count..

You are eating an extremely low-carb diet that is far from the norm. The average carbohydrate consumption for a normal 2,000-calorie diet is almost ten times as much as what you're eating. So sure, I guess Soylent isn't useful for outlier diets, but it's fine for people with normal diets.

How much longer would an apple and a handful of walnuts take to eat?

I'll have that as well, usually with a soylent. An apple and nuts just doesn't leave you feeling very full for long.

Eating a meal takes a lot of time. You've got to prepare it, clean up afterwards, and take your mind off of whatever you are doing. Or you have to order it, and then still usually there's some cleanup and interaction.

The liquid Soylent is about as disruptive as drinking water. That's really useful to me when I'm sucked into a programming challenge or research task. Sometimes I'll go 3-4 days doing nothing but work and sleep. A meal is really disruptive during those times, because I just want my head fully integrated into the problems I'm working on.

If that's a regular schedule for you - Don't you feel you're missing out on living life?

Telling someone they're "missing out on living life" just because they don't do the same thing as you is really condescending.

I don't think it was meant that way, I didn't take offense.

When I'm really sucked into a problem is one of the few times that I feel fully alive. It's like being in a flow state for multiple days, pushing every cognitive resource I have to reach a solution.

I think it happens less than once a month, and almost always lasts less than a week.

I do wish that I went hiking more often, camping more often, and I wish that I had more social interactions that were free of social and business undertones.

You sound like me 25 years ago. I assume you are still young (20-30?) but I would urge you to take a look at your lifestyle and habits now, with a view to changing it to incorporate more of your hiking and camping and social interactions that you mention.

I once felt that living like you currently are was sustainable and that I would be impervious to the long term effects, but now that I have hit the half century mark, I am finding I suffer from all sorts of back and shoulder pain from sitting for extended programming sessions lasting days. I also have rapidly degrading eyesight, and high risk of glaucoma from staring at screens all day every day, and I have other health and digestive issues from not eating regular healthy meals, or drinking enough water back in the day.

It is highly likely that the lifestyle you are accustomed to will turn around and bite you one day. Make changes now so that you don't end up the same as this old programmer. :)

Mathematicians get a similar mental state from the release of dopamine that rewards working on and successfully solving ever more complex problems. I've also seen engineers comment similarly about it, and it sounded quite like what my great grandfather described when working on a complex math problem over a span of time.

That being said, make time for yourself, all consuming projects will make you discontent with life in general.

I wondered if maybe I was missing out at some point, but after pushing myself to do other stuff, what I quickly realised was that I do what I do because it is what I enjoy.

It is not necessarily less "living life", just different choices.

Of course, that assumes you do it because you're working on things that excite you and interest you because you enjoy them.

At that effort level I was hoping you're working on curing a disease or at least something more important than the cloud. :-/

I'm honored that you dug into it.

I'm working on decentralization, which I think is a very socially important goal. The cloud is not my ultimate objective, but it's one of the very few short term use cases I see where a decentralized system seems to have the potential to utterly dominate a centralized one.

Decentralized tech is very new. It's very hopium, and it's very poorly understood, both by zealots and by non-believers. I think that decentralization is going to change a lot of things in fundamental ways, and I think I can move the field forward faster by building a tangible, provably working, provably superior use case for decentralized tech.

Cloud storage is not as glamorous as starting a new world order, but the most important engineering is often the most mundane. People probably felt similarly about the Internet back before the world wide web was invented.

What are you specifically working on decentralizing? Do you have an end goal in mind for what a perfectly decentralized world would look like? Eg. a SBC in every home & office running a mailserver, webserver, etc

Edit: I think decentralization is great (like say IPFS), but I would not risk health or put off others to dedicate all my time to working on it, social interaction is an everyday need!

Ultimately I would like to see that people are allowed to maintain full control over their access to money and information. As tech improves, those things are getting more important, and right now the trend is to increasingly outsource the control (especially for information) to centralized entities that likely don't have your well-being as their primary objective.

There are a vast number of things that fit under the umbrella of tech that needs to be decentralized to give you full control over your money and information.

What part of that stack are you working on? Blockchain currency, low level networking, distributed filesystems, p2p websites, ...

I'd give up now.

Hari Seldon of decentralization, I tip my hat.

I used to do that as well when I was younger. Obviously not with Soylent, that wasn't around then. It works well for menial programming tasks where time is the limiting factor. Incidently, those are the problems where you can for the most part jump out and right back in without too much overhead. But when facing a hard problem, getting up and away from the computer, and cooking a meal always mean I'll solve the problem faster and better. Simply because I let the problem alone for a while. I even use non tech coworkers for sparing, explaning the problem, and answering their questions means I'll have to think about the problem in a significantly different way - often revealing insight in the process. YMMW

> I used to do that as well when I was younger. Obviously not with Soylent, that wasn't around then.

Is Soylent ramen for rich people?

Oh, hey, this is my favorite so far. Can Soylent just be a shitty food choice, full stop? I think yes!

Maybe, except it seems better to your body than most normal meals you eat ;).

Stealing this shamelessly

If Ramen were nutritionally complete to a reasonably modern understanding of Human nutrition

A thousand times this. I remember staying up late to finish programming problems when I was young (and stupid). Now I find the most effective way of solving hard programming problems is to spend an afternoon attacking it and then go to sleep at a normal hour. Magically, an elegant solution - usually quite different from work in progress - appears in my brain while I'm showering.

I do my best work while sleeping, I just need to figure out how to bill for it.

Agreed - for really hard problems I've never found that pounding away directly is effective. I load up on the required information and then intentionally go and do something else (ironically cooking seem to does it for me but overnight and in shower also works) and out of nowhere a solution will appear.

> Sometimes I'll go 3-4 days doing nothing but work and sleep.

That sounds extremely unhealthy from both a physical and a mental standpoint.

Ok so why specifically Soylent and not one of the many alternatives?

    "Good morning," said the little prince.

    "Good morning," said the merchant.

    This was a merchant who sold pills that had been
    invented to quench thirst. You need only swallow one
    pill a week, and you would feel no need of anything to
    drink.

    "Why are you selling those?" asked the little prince.

    "Because they save a tremendous amount of time," said
    the merchant. "Computations have been made by experts.
    With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every
    week."

    "And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?"

    "Anything you like..."

    "As for me," said the little prince to himself, "if I
    had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should
    walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water."

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

IS either opinion incorrect? Why can't we agree that some people don't want to take time preparing food, and others do?

It's not about the food. It's about slowing down and taking your time. When you start taking tablets to save time drinking, o soylent, to save time eating, you for sure do not slow down. Why it is important to slow down and unplug is another big topic, but that is absolutely essential.

"New technology usurps romanticization of older technology" is not a new and surprising concept. One could replace "pill" and "spring of fresh water" with any technological advancement which took over some earlier activity that a subset of the population found and still finds enjoyable to do. Typewriters and computers, bicycles and cars, making a fire using sticks verses using a stove to cook food even.

In my experience no one who treats that idea as novel ever seems to offer a litmus test to tell if the value of technology trumps the potential enjoyment in doing something manually. Does rimantas use stone or metal tools to cook? But the feeling of spinning the tree branch in your hands against the kindling! How greatly rimantas has lost in their fervor for convenience...

It has nothing to do with technology and tools.

>You've got to [...] take your mind off of whatever you are doing

Exactly the reason we should enjoy actual regular meals, preferably with other people.

> Sometimes I'll go 3-4 days doing nothing but work and sleep.

I know this is HN, but that sounds awful.

> Sometimes I'll go 3-4 days doing nothing but work and sleep

In all seriousness, this is tremendously unhealthy. Get up and go for a walk, a light jog, something. The health consequences of even just being sedentary for that long are terrible (to say nothing of the psychological consequences of deceiving yourself into thinking that work is the only thing of value in life).

Surely cleaning up after cooking is almost always a chore, no matter how delicious the food was?

You could also take pride in cleaning and maintaining your tools. It's rather fast if you don't burn your food and if you use proper cleaning agents like "Barkeepers Friend" when soap isn't appropriate.

i usually cleanup while i listen to an audiobook/music. it's not a chore.

How can you eat 5,000 kcal a day and not be a huge fat pig? How many miles a day do you need to run to burn that off?

I used to be a normal weight, but I had to eat 1,200 kcals and run 4 miles a day.

How can you eat 5,000 kcal a day and not be a huge fat pig? How many miles a day do you need to run to burn that off?

On the days when I lift weights I eat close to 5K calories, sometimes even a little more, depending on the commute. All of my daily commute is by bike, including taking my kid to and from the kindergarten, and later to some extra activities (welcome to Denmark), which can be anywhere between 20 and 35 km total for the day.

I'm 178 cm and weigh around 79 kg.

Thats quite a bit of cycling. Don't you think all that cycling is getting into your lifting? I used to cycle about 10km a day and found that it was already hampering leg training at the gym.

Not if you are eating 5000 kcals and getting enough sleep...

I actually changed my approach to lifting a little and now following the principles described by Greg Nuckols in his article about increasing work capacity

http://strengtheory.com/increasing-work-capacity/

So essentially every week I'm doing just a little bit more volume in every exercise, either by adding a little weight, or an extra rep. So far I'm able to do it consistently for a few months so I guess I'm recovering well.

Then of course there is all that "getting used to it" thing where you do something long enough and get into it gradually and increase little by little and you're fine.

I worked originally about 5 km from home and it felt like it was enough cycling there and back. Then I changed my job and now I was 11 km from home so I started combining bike + train for a while because that felt like too much to cycle. Then one sunny day I cycled all the way home. I realized two things: 1) I'm not that tired and 2) I cut 10 minutes off my train + bike commute. So now I bike all the way and save time and money at the same time! Win-win!

Thats one hell of a boost to your TDEE. Im impressed.

I lift 5x, walk every where and swim LISS 3x a week. 173cm about 82kg. TDEE is ~3250 kcal. Currently shoot for 3500 a day. However, I only see my son on weekends. I bet my TDEE would be higher if had him every day.

Don't you ever have things to do?

I like a great meal a lot, but if that was the three top events each day, I'd consider it an empty life.

You are clearly not French or have you lived there. A great meal should absolutely be one of the highlights of a day. Food can be (and should be) the catalyst of great conversations, great ideas or even meditative self-reflection.

Soylent seems to me to be a hipster Ultra Slim Fast and consumed for the exact same reasons legions of working women have that stuff in office refrigerators.

I can respect that people have different priorities than a great meal each day, but I can also pity them.

Even if I was French, I would be happy to ignore arguments about how I must to things because it's The French Way.

Who said anything about that? Of course I have things to do, but grabbing a sandwich from the deli on my block is almost as fast as soylent and much more enjoyable.

Although from this thread I'm starting to think the real reason many people dislike Soylent is the holier-than-thou attitude many of it's supporters seem to sport :)

> This is the problem. That concept is completely foreign to a lot of people (me included). The combination of my body's needs and the way I was raised lead me to view each meal as an opportunity to be enjoyed, never a chore.

Different people, different concepts :). I used a Soylent clone in the past to replace breakfast/lunch and I liked it. I feel I might be unique at that among my coworkers, but I e.g. really prefer eating at my desk - I can parallelize it with work, or reading a book, or reading HN, which is infinitely more interesting to me than eating out with most people.

> but I'll never understand that feeling of "ugh, I need to eat, guess I'll have a Soylent".

My mother was on a diet plan once, where they suggested two options for meals each day, and if you really didn't feel like eating that, you could replace it with a protein shake. There were days when that shake really was the best alternative, and it allowed her to stick to the plan instead of giving up.

That's a problem of empathy. You can't understand how other people would have this specific feeling or practice. Obviously though many people do have it.

There seems to be something very unsettling to people like you about the idea of "meal replacement". To me it appears to be a kind of cultural conservatism, like it's an attack on "family values".

It's not about empathy. The original poster was asking why people don't understand Soylent, and my answer is that it's solving a problem that they never even considered could be a problem.

But do you understand that based on the way I was raised, eat was the thing you did because if you didn't you'd literally die?

There is no cultural value to food, for me. There is no social value that I find appealing about food.

Right, I do understand that! That's the whole point. Your experience is completely foreign to me which is why I didn't understand Soylent's purpose when it first came out. It's like trying to sell an umbrella to a nomad in the Sahara.

Not everybody is the same. Maybe it's not for you, but for people to busy with something else to think about what to eat, soylent is a lot better than fast food, a bar, whatever random crap you have lying around, or skipping a meal.

That's not _the_ problem, it just means Soylent isn't for you. Which is cool. I love Soylent 2.0. I'm very happy that I can get a decent chunk of my calories from a vegan source with little effort and lots of convenience.

Maybe it's the way Soylent markets itself, but I don't understand why people are so _personally_ offended by it. Just... don't eat it.

It depends a little on what you choose to eat. Hitting my calorie goals would be easy if I ate fast food, but I'm trying to bulk while avoiding refined carbs and keeping my fruit & vegetable intake up.

There's a volume challenge - 5,000kcal is only 1.5lb of butter, but 32lb of broccoli.

There's also a mechanical challenge- chewing constantly (e.g. when eating lots of vegetables) is emotionally exhausting.

I do acknowledge it's possible there are people out there for whom there is simply no greater joy than eating, who would eat nonstop with joy. But, not everyone is like that.

> This is the problem. That concept is completely foreign to a lot of people (me included).

When I arrive home to an empty apartment at 9PM, I sure as hell don't feel like cooking. Sure, I cook great meals during the weekend and the days I come home early. But cooking when you got back from a big day of work + an infernal commute is cooking nothing but a chore.

Edit: That being said, I'll drink a regular liquid meal and only if all the other alternatives can't be done (no food in the fridge, I am not home, I need to eat in the car, etc.) I don't see the need to get Soylent either.

"It's not [...] supposed to replace all meals."

Wait,

"Soylent is an open source meal REPLACEMENT[emph added], advertised as a "staple meal", available in liquid and powdered forms as a beverage, and as a solid-form meal bar. Its creators state that Soylent meets all nutritional requirements for an average adult."

If something is advertised as a "meal replacement", it seems likely that people will use it to ... replace their meals - for those inclined, that would mean "all meals".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_(food)

Also, they originally advertised it with copy like "A full day of balanced nutrition prepared in 3 minutes for $3/meal" and "What if you never have to worry about food again?"

https://web.archive.org/web/20150515220800/https://www.soyle...

Well yeah, you don't eat one meal your whole life. You have multiple meals in a day.

But regardless, they went for that angle in the early days because it got them the advertising and funding. It got the attention, it's good marketing.

Nowadays they bill it as a meal replacer, in the respect of you CAN replace whatever meal you want with it without having to worry about the effort or time it takes to prepare/research a good balanced meal.

All that said, I don't personally use the stuff but would like to try it out.

Processed food is always a bad idea.

It's simple, really: The closer your are to nature, the better you feel (because the healthier you are). Our body is happier when we spend our time in nature instead of artificial environment (there are studies on that subject) and we are less cancerous when we eat natural food (as opposed to processed food).

Every time we step away from our nature, we sabotage ourselves.

MMM, delicious natural snake venom.

I'm partial to that all-natural cyanide myself.

With a uranium chaser.

....you realise people are living longer than they ever have before, even though we all live in bigass cities - the literal antithesis of nature.

Well, you have a point, but our ancestors eated carrion... mmhhh, sweet, sweet carrion.

Start cooking food was a big step. Too much of nature and your body can turn into an aquatic park.

It's not that people are too stupid to understand, they just did a really bad job telling us, but it kind of was their PR strategy. Look how many articles there are "I ate Soylent only for X days".

Let's see how long it takes them to lose that image of a complete food replacement.

True that, it helped them get the funding and the interest so it was a great marketing strategy. But now that people understand the theory (ie you can supply someone with all the nutrition they need from the one product) they are going a bit more on a sane sort of image.

Soylent makes perfect sense in the context of a meal replacer for busy or lazy people. But even the original creator stopped eating it at all times because he missed the "social aspect of eating".

That's probably just me but a lifestyle where you have no time to take a break (or meet friends/colleagues) and eat doesn't sound very healthy and not very desirable either. I understand the desire to optimise eating times and life overall, and sometimes there's a lot of work that seems important, but at the point where you drink a supplement rather than eat it seems there's no life left in what should be more than just a person working and sleeping (or napping if you're in the sleep optimiser boat..) .

Probably it's all not that black and white, you like the convenience etc, but damn it just sounds sad. I also used to try to optimise my life to have impact etc, until i realised that i don't want to miss out on also living it.

Why is this getting downvoted? It is incredibly sad when meals need 'replacing.' I understand once in awhile, but it seems like people are habitually making meal replacement a viable lifestyle choice.

It IS sad, downvotes or not.

don't worry, you're not alone. unfortunately i do have to skip meals occasionally but i always try to get something reasonable. eating an avocado with some seasoning, or other fruit like a banana, or some cheese, or some turkey slices, or a small bag of carrots, or hell even skipping a meal so i can eat a little more at dinner without blowing my calorie budget -- sounds infinitely more appetizing than drinking some lab-made slop that comes in a bottle. the possibilities are literally endless.

i've known since high school that there are some people out there that view eating as a nuisance but i didn't know there were so many that were in the tech industry. everyone i've ever known in tech loved eating/cooking/meals out/whatever (obviously i've been self-selecting my social group!)

What if you usually break for lunch with colleagues but just have some days when you don't get a chance to take a break - you're not planning a life without breaks, but the database server crashes and shit happens?

What if you schedule your workday too tightly to break for lunch specifically so that you can leave the office earlier and spend time with the people you love?

What if you'd rather spend an extra hour a couple times a week hiking with your friends / family rather than chopping vegetables and scrubbing pots?

What if spending less time on food ENABLES you to live your life instead of missing out?

What about a lifestyle where you have time to take a break, but you don't want to spend that break preparing, eating, and cleaning up after food? You'd rather spend it, say, reading a great book, working on an interesting side project, playing a tabletop game with friends you invited over, or just laying in a hammock reflecting on life?

Due to how cultural values vary, I'm not surprised that many HN readers are repulsed to some degree by the idea of not preparing and consuming a traditional meal. It's just a kind of conservatism, a recognition of traditional values that help us find another way to enjoy life.

In my own time growing up, my family had traditionally prepared meals almost every day together, and yet even as a child I had little patience for it. I was endlessly curious, wanted to explore the world, play with dad, tinker with my computer, read something, write something, draw something, make something. My life was incredibly full of worth and value to me, and I enjoyed it immensely -- and yet, meals were only ever a distraction, merely one of the lesser chores I had to take care of to keep enjoying the rest of my life.

This sentiment is still largely with me today. Today, meals either serve as a mechanism for me to guarantee people I want to spend time with will be in the same place at the same time, or else I'm alone, in which case I simply see no point in all the bother. There are still many things much more interesting and spiritually fulfilling to me than preparing, consuming, and cleaning up after a traditional meal. Gladly would I accept a solution that successfully meets all of my nutritional needs while also allowing me to do any of those other things instead.

"Why don't people understand? It's so simple: Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need. It's not a) the ONLY food you can eat or b) supposed to replace all meals."

Problem already solved, MRE [0] and discussed [1].

[0] Example here is a Patrol Ration One Man (PR1M) used in the ADF ~ https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/4549780731/in/set-7215762...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1665563

> Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need.

But there are already so many meal replacements on the market, from companies that actually know what they are doing. Why choose soylent?

Soylent is not the cheapest. It's not the tastiest. It doesn't have the best macro balance.

Why soylent and not one of the trusted brands?

Please point me to an existing trusted meal replacement brand that has a balanced nutritional profile.

No, Ensure, Slimfast, Boost, etc. are not balanced (eg. too much sugar and vitamins, not enough calories and fiber).

>> Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need

Thanks god for creating apples and bananas and thanks the grocery stores for selling them all the year round. And thanks the Germans for putting a bakery on every corner.

Those are not nutritionally complete, fruits go bad and most people don't live next to an open bakery.

Not all of your meals has to be "nutritionally complete".

You can store apples during the whole winter if you have below 0 degrees outside. We did it when I was young.

Quality of life does not starts with a 6 digit salary and ends with working on the next Uber for X. Living in the right country/city with the right people can case you a lot of happiness. I know because I was born behind the iron curtain.

So instead of Soylent you are suggesting people live in the right country/city with the right people? Uh-huh.

Not exactly. Insted of drinking Soylent go to a nearby shop and by some apples and rye bread. If there are any shops... you maybe just found a market gap. Opening one you could make your city to a better place for living.

Food deserts in the US are pretty common. That makes it harder for people to get nutritious, cheap, fresh food.

> Not all of your meals has to be "nutritionally complete".

But is that really a reason to argue against nutritionally complete meals? Healthy is still better than unhealthy. I suppose the choice becomes healthy or tasty at some point.

I am saying that "nutritionally complete meals" try to solve a problem you do not actually have. Please feel free to consider this as an argument against Soylent.

Why is that not an existing problem? Is all nutrition bogus? Or does everybody magically end up with balanced nutrition without trying?

I think a lot of people eat very unhealthy, especially people who have no time to cook a proper meal. Something that helps them eat more nutritionally balanced food could do them a lot of good.

Nutritionally complete meals and nutritionally complete diet are not the same. You can have a balanced, nutritionally complete diet without nutritionally complete meals if you mix them well. Unfortunatelly this is not an 100 M$ idea.

>> people who have no time to cook a proper meal

Are we talking about the same people they spend daily 4+ hours wathing TV?

I think we're talking about people who spend 12+ hours coding.

If it's not a single source food, you don't need it to be complete. An occasional gap filler can be substantially unbalanced on its own without affecting overall balance much.

Our office has the traditional free soda .. and, amazingly, free fruit. Delivered by local grocers. Not that a crate of bananas in winter is "local".

I'd quite like to have a good portable locally sold lunch option that doesn't have bread of some sort in, but the only option seems to be soup.

Why do you buy Soylent instead of Ensure?

https://ensure.com/nutrition-products/protein-shakes-healthy...

Is it cheaper? More complete? Dehydrated?

It seems like the answer to this and similar questions on here, which is Soylent's true "innovation" in my estimation, is that Soylent is the first meal replacement with young men as a target market. Meal replacements are pretty convenient, but if you're an 18-25 y.o. man I have a feeling there's a nonzero level of stigma (real or just feared) associated with drinking SlimFast ("women's drink") or Ensure ("old people drink") all the time. Before now all there was for young people were protein shakes + multivitamin, which is also possibly too associated with bodybuilding/gym rats for comfort for some people.

But if you're a young man drinking Soylent, this hip new VC-backed tech fuel drink, it occupies a similar mental association space to Red Bull. I can't help just seeing it as a marketing thing.

Less sweet.

I was on a liquid diet for a while for medical reasons. Ensure (and other drinks in that space) are horrifyingly sugary, and even their "diabetic" formula is disgustingly sweet and high in simple processed carbs that are a half step up from sucrose. They're also extremely low in fiber.

Additionally, though the vitamins and minerals are balanced for consuming four per day, you'd have to drink 8-10 of them daily to fill the caloric needs of a healthy and not particularly active adult. Sugar is a surprisingly inefficient source of calories on the scale of an adult's daily metabolic needs.

Soylent has a very neutral flavor that can be seasoned for a sweet or savory effect, and a bottle has roughly the right amount of calories for a meal for an adult. If you're moderately active and eating nothing else, around 5 per day will suffice.

Even on a liquid diet, I ate other things besides soylent, and I struggled to consume enough calories to meet my basal metabolic rate - below which your body will start consuming itself for energy. (Forget maintaining your original weight on a liquid diet at all.) Whole milk, you say? I was forbidden to consume significant amounts of lactose.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of options were either extremely sweet or would fill your stomach without providing meaningful nutrition (a cup of chicken broth has 10 calories!) Despite usually being a chocolate hound, after two weeks of that I would gag at the thought of a m&m. Soylent at least was neutral and would keep me feeling full for a little while.

I used to drink a couple of Ensure every day. Soylent has more calories, protein and nutrients per serving while basically being the same price.

> Why don't people understand?

> It's not [...] b) supposed to replace all meals.

That's not how it was advertised during launch and the kickstarter. It was heavily pushed as a sole source of nutrition.

People are only repeating what Soylent said.

I think the point was that it could, but doesn't have to, replace all meals.

So, Soylent push it as a sole source of nutrition, and some people use it as such, but then when there are problems people say "but you shouldn't do that", even though most of the people experiencing the problems aren't doing that and even though it's something pushed as possible by Soylent.

If you can use Soylent as a sole source of nutrition there shouldn't be anyone in this thread saying that Soylent is never meant to be used as a sole source of nutrition.

If you can't use it as such then Soylent have been irresponsible in their marketing (although they have toned it down a bit).

Right, but where's the tech innovation? I mean check it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Met-Rx - meal replacement powders/shakes have been around for a looooong time, and you can order online too...

That's what I don't get. Most people have difficulties keeping their weight in check rather than vice versa, and you can get all kind of snacks, ranging from healthy to extremely unhealthy, practically everywhere. Streets and shops and cafés are plastered with food, the abundance is mind-boggling if you think about it (or come from some really poor country).

How is mixing & drinking a glass of Soylent easier or less time consuming than eating a sandwich with cheese & lettuce? Or an apple?

It is just more nutritionally sound and low effort compared to almost all other quick fixes.

For me it's the storage. Lettuce goes bad, fruits rot, bread gets moldy, all within a short timeframe.

I buy some Soylent and it will be good there for a while. So when I'm hungry and we are out of bread, now it's a 30 second meal vs a 30 minutes or more to run to the store.

> Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

>I buy some Soylent and it will be good there for a while.

... Which as far as I or anyone else knows has nothing to do with it's shelf-life.

Regardless, I'm hoping you realize that I was being general and using "Soylent" as the example there because that was the topic of conversation.

Also your comment is especially funny to me as I've never purchased Soylent the product. I have things similar to it, but I've never bought any Soylent. Once they get this figured out, I might try their bars, but they seem a bit expensive for me which is why I'm always apprehensive to pull the trigger.

Exactly. Twice this week I've been in meetings that ran long and left me with no time for lunch.

I keep a box of soylent under my desk specifically for days like this. Without food I get "hangry" and can't concentrate.

I can chug a bottle of soylent in a minute or two between meetings, or sip from it instead of from a water glass, without being even as disruptive as an energy bar would be. (Plus I can't stand how sugary those things are.)

It's a terrible substitute for a salad but there's every reason to believe it's better for you than a slice of pizza or a bag of chips. Like any other food, it has a place in a healthy diet as long as it's in moderation.

Yes, Soylent is Slim-Fast.

Just with a different marketing pitch.

I think you're right -- Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need, and it's marketed with a message that appeals to men, unlike SlimFast. You gotta admit that all the folks responding who are talking about how Soylent feeds their programming mania feel way cooler & smarter drinking Soylent, the techy solution, as opposed to SlimFast, the 1970s ladies' drink, or EAS Myoplex Ketogenic Meal Replacement, the bodybuilder's choice! Only one of these companies is venture-backed!

Its a more fundamental misunderstanding. You don't have time to eat, that is why you use this product. A lot of the other commenters cannot conceive of that world view as a regular state. Along with myself, if I don't have time to eat something that is fine. If this happens more than once a week/month, I am going to change my life as obviously something is very wrong with the way I am living it. To me, food is part of the reason for living. It's social, tasty, visceral, primal, fun, enjoyable, etc. It makes me who I am and is a part of my identity. For you, that is not necessarily true, as far as I can read about you in a single comment. Like, if I am dashing out the door and don't have time to cook a breakfast, then fine, Soylent is ok. If I have done this more than once in my week, I am going to wake up much earlier and go to bed earlier too in order to make that breakfast and prep my lunches that are tasty and good for me. If I have to work late, fine, Soylent. If that happens a lot in my life, I am going to start quickly looking for another job that lets me see my wife and kids and eat dinners with them and have fun making the food too and doing the dishes. A habit of missing meals is not on the table for me. I will never order a box of soylent, as I will never need it. If I ever go through that much, something is very very wrong with my life and needs immediate change. I know this is not true of you and many of Soylent's customers, and I don't mean to disparage you. I just want to explain the misunderstanding. They obviously have a customer base, yourself included, but for many of us, using Soylent habitually is impossible to understand.

I did a DIY soylent diet for ~6 months last year. I had maybe 1 regular meal every 2 weeks during that time.

Honestly, it fucking kicked ass. I'll list some of the pros and cons

Pro

- Easy to make

- Portable

- Little mess/no cleaning

- More time to do other stuff

- Most insane regular shits. 2pm everyday, sit, shit, 2x wipe, done in 30 seconds. Every shit was exactly the same.

- Never any indigestion, gas, diarrhea, sick feeling

- Never felt hungry. Like I would go weeks without feeling that sensation

- Felt really good overall

- Skin disease cleared up for the first time in over a decade

- Perfect control over calories and macro composition

- Cheap(ish), $7 a day.

Cons

- Bland/bad taste and texture

- Gets old fast (like "Ugghh, not this again")

- Must drink lots of water with it. (really only a con because I had to carry a water bottle too, but water is good for you)

- Takes a while to drink, at least for me.

- Piss is neon yellow (from vitamin B, not really a con, just odd)

- People are kind of freaked out by it

- Doesn't store well in liquid form, so must be made each time before drinking or at least daily.

- Needs some time to sit (~30 min) after making or else it has a really bitter taste.

- First 2 weeks were brutal. Felt all manner of sick and uneasy from it. My body felt all out of wack. Intense headaches too. Others had warned of this so I pushed on. I was about to give up but on day 13 I woke up feeling great and it was smooth sailing from then on out. Guess it was my body adjusting? I had a really shit diet before that.

Right now I am still drinking them but way less, maybe 6 a week down from 21 a week. Regular food is just so good. But I plan to go back to it in the near future.

Armies have mutinied over bad food and here you are voluntarily subsisting on gruel. The 21st century is weird.

Well yeah, armies didn't really have much else to entertain them back in the day.

We have enough other stuff in our lives to look forward to that we can sacrifice one part of it.

Not that anyone should if they don't want to, just saying I can understand it.

Care to share your recipe?

https://diy.soylent.com/recipes/seans-lean-mass-gainer

I use a different protein (NOW dutch choc isolate) and a different oil (smart balance). I also dropped the choline because it has a bad interaction with nicotine and I use an e-cig. When I went full soylent though I used it because I stopped using my e-cig during that time. I also added in 5g creatine.

I should note that this is a mass building recipe and meant for use while lifting. It has way more protein then you need for regular day to day. You can axe the protein down to ~60g daily and use it.

Also if you want to try it, get the corn flour from the grocery not amazon. It's waaaayy over priced on amazon.

>I use an e-cig

Why bother getting healthy in one aspect of your life if you're going to trash it in another?

How is using an e-cig trashing your health?

I''ll bet my money on the misconception that cigarette = nicotine [0]

And that health is a zero-sum game. It's not.

[0] gwern.net/Nicotine

There have been many studies showing that they are harmful to your health. Not as bad as cigarettes, but still bad.

Have there?

I see people saying this, and I've seen that they have short-term effects one would expect from taking in nicotine (not that dissimilar to caffeine), but nothing much suggesting that they're harmful in the longer term.

Why do you have "Never any ... sick feeling" under pro, and then under con "First 2 weeks were brutal. Felt all manner of sick and uneasy"?

Probably because he intended to mean for that Pro to generally cover the remaining 5.5 months after what one could call the "induction" period. Once he was consistently on the diet and past the transition, having no sick feelings is a good sign that he adjusted to it, and that the initial uneasiness was only temporary, not an ongoing, permanent byproduct of the new diet.

Not sure what the sick feeling they had was, but any diet for me usually takes my system a little getting used to, especially if the food makes you more regular. You and your gut aren't used to all the fiber and it will not feel good at first, but I would bet its fine after awhile.

Ok fair enough. After the 2 weeks of hell I never felt sick or anything.

Throughout my entire life I always would get get some form of indigestion pretty regularly. It had gotten to the point where I just accepted it as what it is to be human. Nausea was by far the most common and happened all the time. Once over that two week hump though, everything went away. It was awesome. Now I still get some indigestion since I eat more much regular food now, but I eat a healthier diet so it's not so bad.

I absolutely love food and I'd say a significant amount of my hobby budget goes into food and cooking supplies.

I was an early Soylent supporter because my wife and I were curious about it and thought it might be inexpensive and sensible to replace our lunch meals with it. If we both worked through lunch, hilariously, we could have had an extra hour to spend cooking dinner.

Not every meal of my day needs to be a fine dining experience.

Also, my wife was pregnant, and having a lot of random food aversions. The idea of something you could just sort of mindlessly drink was appealing to her.

She tried it once and really hated it. I tried it twice and also really hated it. So it didn't stick for us, but I liked the idea of it. I brought it to the place I was working at the time and one of the engineers there really took to it, ate all the rest of it over the course of a few weeks. Different strokes.

If you stopped solely based on taste you should just try a couple similar products, eg. ambronite might fit the bill pretty spot on.

There's a niche that Soylent has been really helpful in, that pretty much everyone seems to have ignored so far (including Soylent-the-company, who I sent an email to regarding this and received back a form letter response that hadn't had all of its fields filled in).

Backpacking, hiking, search and rescue, hunting, anything outdoors.

I carry an unopened package of Soylent powder in my SAR pack and I've been glad I have it several times. Take a Nalgene, fill it up to about 300 ml with powder, add water, shake vigorously, and now you have enough fuel to ease fatigue for several hours. It's lightweight and convenient and easy. Cleanup is simple.

Now when I'm peak-bagging my default is just to carry some Soylent with me. The only time I carry my mess kit anymore is if I'm going out with the intention of a morning, afternoon, or evening meal ritual being a planned part of the trip. Like, "let's hike out to Phoenix Lake and have a nice hot dinner at sunset." Otherwise, Soylent.

I've been gradually becoming a disciple of the ultralight over the last couple of years and food weight is challenging to whittle down. The alternatives, freeze-dried anything, are mostly disgusting and still require carrying a stove, fuel, and require cleanup. Soylent has reduced my pack weight and size by quite a bit, and (for the most part) I'm getting better nutrition overall because I can just chug it in small doses throughout the day. It also means I'm less likely to develop a fatigue-related injury.

It's gotten some attention from other folks on my SAR team and my longtime hiking partner has started giving it a try too. It doesn't seem to be something that's really caught on in the outdoor industry yet. I really wish Soylent would sell small, lightweight packages of the powder that were pre-sized to mix with about .8 liters of water and then get it into places like REI, but I guess that's not something they're very interested in.

I tried the powder when backpacking like you described when I went on a camping trip last year. The problem is that you need to rinse the Nalgene bottle thoroughly after consuming the Soylent (which means you have to carry excess water, or find a water source relatively quickly). Otherwise it stinks like hell.

I found Soylent 2.0 and Coffiest work a lot better, since their bottles are disposable. Just put it in your trash bag and you're good.

How do you deal with the Nalgene getting funky once you're >1 days into a trip, or does the Soylent rinse out cleanly enough for it to not be a concern? I used to use Accelerade for a significant proportion of my calories when backpacking - mainly because I have trouble getting down enough solid food when I'm on the go - but switched to Accel gels because the drink mix would leave the bottle pretty nasty after the first day.

> The alternatives, freeze-dried anything, are mostly disgusting and still require carrying a stove, fuel, and require cleanup

I've found Mountain House to be decently close to tasting like real food and requires no cleanup other than wiping the spoon. A Snow Peak LiteMax with a 750ml titanium pot weigh next to nothing, but there is still the fuel canister. I find the MoHo tasty enough that I'll eat it at home or work on occasion if I really don't want to spend any time on a meal.

I haven't had trouble with rinsing out the Nalgene so far. I'm pretty fastidious with my gear, so everything gets cleaned thoroughly shortly after I get home, which helps. Otherwise, while I'm out, if there's a water source nearby I just rinse with that (not dumping the leftovers into the water obviously), if there isn't, I'll pour about half a cup of my supply into the Nalgene and rinse, shake, and scrub thoroughly with my hands.

The older powder was a bit tougher to clean (but not difficult), the newer one is easier.

Mountain House probably got better since I last tried their stuff, but it still requires stopping, cooking, cleanup. I've got an MSR Windburner and I love it for what it is, but if I just want to put down a lot of miles for a quick trip the Soylent is king. I'm >this< close to being able to do a Summer overnight with my 12L BD Bbee.

...of course, developing some serious intestinal discomfort 18 miles from the car would suck, so there's that.

You've inspired me to give this a go. I do a lot of hiking, but never considered Soylent or the UK equivalent - Huel [1].

Just ordered my first batch of Huel and am going to try it next weekend. Could make my pack lighter and might be more nutritious.

1. https://huel.com/

Generally speaking it seems like energy bars targeting the outdoors crowd come in bar form. I can see that... from my perspective a bar's easier to lug around in a backpack compared to something you need to add water to.

That said I agree in another aspect... I'm actually surprised I couldn't find more MRE (not just energy-granola type) bars that specifically market to the outdoor crowd on Google, especially considering things like ultralight backpacking becoming more popular. I could only find one offhand (http://www.greenbelly.co/). Maybe I'm missing more, but it does seem like there would be more of a market for this sort of thing.

REI sells a bunch of stuff that's similar other than not coming in as large a single serving size. ProBar and Bonk Breaker are the two I've found to be most palatable. Apart from the big brands at REI, there's a ton of smaller brands - for example: http://katesrealfood.com/. I suspect the reasons there's not more of this stuff in full meal size is that a third of a pound of dry, compressed food is not the most enticing thing to eat multiple times a day.

Speaking for myself, I also find that after a day of getting your ass kicked by Mother Nature, having something that somewhat approximates comfort food - warm, saucy, even if rehydrated - before crawling into your tent or bivy is a big morale booster.

I'm equally amazed how every Soylent article that passes through HN has people that seem to be genuinely offended that some people enjoy Soylent/the idea of Soylent and don't want their lives to revolve around "the beauty of food and social blah blah". It's wild.

Maybe they are shills for the food industry? I don't get it either - why are they even reading a Soylent article.

Maybe they're not shills, just folks trying to expose themselves to new ideas and possibly caught out by some that upturn their current views.

Sometimes they might not understand, so they reach out and converse with others: "I don't understand why anyone would X, because Y has always worked for me." What's so wrong with that conversation and assume they're shills?

Believe it or not, some people are just not really into food. Just like some people are not into music or sports.

I'm really not into food. I force myself to eat. If it wasn't for me trying to bulk up I'd eat just one meal a day and be fine. I force myself to eat 2800 to 3000 calories per day and it's a HUGE pain in the ass. Since I first heard about Soylent I wished they'd start selling Here in Brazil. This report doesn't change that.

To be honest, Brazilian food is IMO some of the most bland and least interesting in the continent, so it wouldn't be suprising.

A lot of people think they don't like fish because they've never tasted fresh fish.

I love food. Too much, I'm very overweight because of it. My initial reaction was the same - why the hell would I want to take calories and not taste something great? It sounded like madness.

Then I tried Huel (Soylent equivalent made in the UK), and I get it. The best way I can describe it is that food had become like music for me. Rather than just sitting down and listening to music, I have some music on all the time, in the background. I constantly wanted to be tasting something, eating.

I found that by using Huel, I changed that habit. I can prepare it in a minute and drink it quickly, and it stops me feeling hungry. I can limit my calorie intake perfectly without having to think about tracking it, and it means I can avoid thinking about food at all. Then, on occasion, when I go out with friends or whatever, I can have a real meal and really enjoy the tastes.

It's like only listening to music when I go out to a concert and that's all I'm doing.

It's not for everyone, for sure, but there are definitely real cases for it. I'm sure on the other end of the spectrum, there are people that just don't care about food and this helps them remember to eat the right amount.

Assuming that your relationship with food is the same as everyone else's is your mistake.

I'm still curious why the soylent thing has hit it off in the HN crowd and not, say, Slimfast. Which is basically the same thing but with more production hardening.

Maybe fragile masculinity? IDK.

Ha this is on my mind every single time someone brings up Soylent. Seriously, it's a joke. Some kid makes a knock off slimfast meal supplement and HN is all "Goddamn genius is disrupting meals. This is the future man!"

This would make a great Black Mirror episode.

Did you even compare the nutrition facts before writing this hilariously condescending post?

I wouldn't attribute it to some kind of nefarious gender issue.

It's as simple as marketing, which does matter. Slimfast in it's name implies a diet drink, not food replacement. Most people would never even consider them in the same arena and that's due to simple marketing by the very companies that produce them.

Yes, I can see that in the case of Soylent vs Slimfast, customer choice is driven by what marketing says is the intended use.

But don't be too quick to dismiss masculinity or coolness factors in product selection. Diet Coke and Coke Zero are essentially the same thing made by the same company (the latter having a slightly different "flavor profile"). Coke Zero exists because some men or many men will not order a Diet Coke: it's sissy or uncool. Coke Zero was introduced solely for that reason.

I can taste the difference between Diet Coke, Coke Zero and the new Coke Zero - Zero Sugar. Diet Coke has the most artificial sweetener taste, while Coke Zero Zero sugar almost has none.

Coke Zero exists because they decided to try to make a diet version of Coke that actually tastes closer to regular Coke. Diet Coke does not use the regular Coca Cola recipe with sugar replaced, but a tweaked one, on purpose.

Compare to e.g. Diet Pepsi, which is to Pepsi what Coke Zero is to Coke, Coca Cola was for decades worried about making something that was too close to the original (hence Tab being their first diet cola)

Or Diet RC Cola, which is the only diet cola product I've ever been close to confuse with the real thing (my parents insisted I "wouldn't notice the difference" with diet colas as a child in an attempt to get me to accept them, and utterly failed).

If you want a diet cola that tastes like a regular cola, Diet Coke will never be it, and it left Coca Cola with a gap in their lineup for people who weren't as concerned about picking a diet product, but would pick one if there's a diet cola available that is "close enough".

Have you ever seen the ads for Diet Coke and Coca Cola Zero?

Coca Cola definitely tried to market Coke Zero to a male audience (it was described as 'Bloke Coke' in UK newspapers [1] around launch), but I think it's popular today not because of the marketing, but because it's a good product. To me, Diet Coke tastes artificial and... bland. Coke Zero tastes similar to regular Coca Cola, but has a distinct enough character to be appealing in its own right. In my experience, this is what most Coke Zero drinkers will say.

[1]: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/introducing-bloke-co...

"Ensure" (I think) is the stuff in a can that they give old people to make them NOT lose too much weight. That sounds close to Soylent.

Soylent in its name implies cannibalism ... so it's interesting that the name would sway people away from Slimfast.

How do they differ in ingredients?

The commercials very prominently suggested replacing breakfast and lunch with Slim-Fast shakes, so much so that "a shake for breakfast, one for lunch, and a sensible dinner" was basically their unofficial slogan. Obviously it was still marketed for weight loss, but the suggested use is strikingly similar to what a lot Soylent advocates suggest.

I think the answer is mostly that Soylent is new and associated with the startup world.

- initially announced on a blog in 2013

- crowdfunded on Tilt, raising over $3M

- got funding from a16z

Due to that it's got a lot of cachet. Also, the idea of a meal replacement is more in line with life/body hacking.

Slimfast goes back to 1987 and is marketed as a diet and weight loss product. One could consider it more "old tech".

This is just my very fallible perception, and I don't intend any judgement on either.

I certainly think that it's a marketing thing; while gender identity I'm sure plays a role as it does in most marketing, it's not the whole story. There are already meal replacement drinks targeted at manly men; muscle milk is one of the more well known brands.

I think that the difference is that this stuff was uniquely (and probably irresponsibly[1]) marketed towards nerds. - It's not advertised, as the shakes I mention before this, to make you bigger or smaller; it's advertised to save you effort on eating; I think that is the primary difference.

[1]My impression is that they have implied that soylent can completely replace normal food for long periods of time, and I personally think that is dangerous, just because of how much we don't know about micros and about the GI tract in general. I'm sure it's fine if you do the slim-fast thing and have 'a delicious shake for breakfast, another for lunch, then a sensible dinner' - but that's not how soylint seems to be advertised.

"There are already meal replacement drinks targeted at manly men; muscle milk is one of the more well known brands."

Huh. I've always gotten the impression that Muscle Milk is a protein supplement (though it's got carbs, too), not really a (full nutritional) meal replacement.

that how it is marketed. My assertion is that the difference is largely marketing; that we don't know enough about nutrition to make a realistically complete long-term meal replacement, making them both "something you might drink sometimes instead of eating something, but something you wouldn't want to live off of long-term"

Of course, I'm no doctor (but then, neither is Rob Rhinehart,) and it is possible research has progressed further than I know; but personally? I wouldn't take the word of a software engineer on this.

>>that how it is marketed. My assertion is that the difference is largely marketing

Nope. Here is what the Muscle Milk website says in their FAQ - note the last sentence:

Many people use MUSCLE MILK® Ready to Drink Shakes and Powders as a meal replacement or snack between meals. The ready-to-drink products are especially convenient to use as a meal replacement or snack when you are on-the-go. MUSCLE MILK® Ready to Drink Shakes should always be used in conjunction with whole foods and adequate hydration, and never as a sole source of nutrition.

http://www.musclemilk.com/learn/

That's exactly what lsc was saying - that Soylent in actuality fits those last two sentences, and that the only real difference between the two is the different emphases (and reckless overselling for Soylent).

Yeah, need to mix whole food in there to keep your bowels functioning well & avoid having the flora in your intestines from dieing off.

It's not that I disagree with you because I think this is probably correct but... I mean do we know that? As a sure thing?

>It's not that I disagree with you because I think this is probably correct but... I mean do we know that? As a sure thing?

My understanding is that we don't know either way, really. Hell, there's still a lot of legitimate controversy about the RDA - and that is just a very short, and certainly incomplete list of micros.

(personally, I'd be more concerned about the missing micros (or that they put in the wrong chemical form of the micros) than I would be about the structure of the food; but I'm no doctor, and certainly chewing is a part of digestion, so maybe that is important, too? I bet you could actually find good studies on that part, though; figuring out if a liquid diet is ok should be easier than figuring out if you have all the micronutrients you need; there are plenty of cases where people are medically tube-fed over the medium to long term.. but I think that even that involves pulped fresh food, and how is that different from food that wasn't recently living? the obvious starting place is the bacteria, but I'm sure there are other differences, too.)

That's the thing, it seems like this would make for interesting medical research but it's instead advertised as a time-saver, without a lot of actual medical supervision.

Again, the 'extraordinary claim' here is just that you can live solely off of the stuff... if they marketed it the way the other meal replacements are marketed, e.g. we tried to make this good for you, but don't let this be the only thing you eat, I think it would be a fine product.

Branding? I think it's basically an Ensure for geeks. "Soylent Green" is from an old science fiction. I seem to recall Soylent being started on Reddit years ago. They call a recipe "open source", and it grew inside a group of internet culture.

It's like how "Gatorade" was neon colored and marketed for athletes, when the same kind of formula was also used for less glamorous rehydration.

Instead of being packaged like Slimfast is, where it becomes part of weight loss culture, Soylent is targeted at hacker types. It fits. They're supposed to always be working and have no time for cooking, and it has a futuristic image, so they integrate with it.

When really, you're right, it's basically the same thing as Slimfast.

http://observer.com/2013/10/how-is-soylent-not-just-slim-fas...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/01/food-tech...

I didn't read those, but I think there's a slight difference between Soylent and other meal replacement drinks, mainly in the purpose. Slimfast is for people who only use them to lose weight. Ensure is for people who only use them because of illness. Soylent is for people who want to transcend humanity to sustain life without the hassle of ingestion.

I get it. I'd love to bypass eating. But I think it's naive. When I saw the people getting excited over it on Reddit many years ago, I rolled my eyes. Nutrition is not so simple and understood where you can mix some ingredients in batch, then drink your meals quickly without thought. You can get away with it for a while, especially if you're young. But it's really a science fiction fantasy, and I thought the people buying into it were naive at best, and being scammed at worst.

Just like I think believing you need Slimfast to lose weight, or that it's a smart approach is equally naive. People want simple programs to follow though, and it's opportunity for businessmen to capitalize on the desire.

Those articles are clickbait, they don't offer a comparison between both. The difference it's not small it's huge https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/82/Slimfastlabel...

Marketing.

I've never heard of slimfast, and if I had I would immediately discount it because I'm not overweight, nor do I eat badly.

Soylent was simply the first product I heard of that did the meal replacement "with everything you need nutritionally" thing.

Not saying it was the first, just that it was the first I'd heard of it.

Never actually went out and got it, but was close because I was at a time in my life where I was too busy to prepare good meals, (between sports, work and my own side projects).

> Not saying it was the first, just that it was the first I'd heard of it.

There are a wide variety of sole-source of nutrition liquid feeds.

The reason you haven't heard of them is because they've been marketed to medical professionals, for use with ill people, and not to the general public.

The lack of caution in the promotion of Soylent is a worrying sign.

Considering the fact that the Slimfast website has learning resources for cooking regular healthy meals, I would posit that their products aren't designed or intended to replace all meals.

http://www.slim-fast.com/recipes/balanced-meals/#balanced-me...

I used to drink SlimFast for lunch everyday, until I became lactose intolerant. Years later, Soylent came out, and I was tired of eating fast food all the time for lunch. Now I drink Soylent for lunch, which is healthier, cheaper, and faster.

The one thing that makes all the recent food alternatives like Soylent interesting is that they are nutritionally complete, or at least aim to be. Especially if you are eating vegetarian, it's easy to miss something vital without being very careful what you consume.

I use a Soylent-like products occasionally just to increase my chances of my body getting all the specific nutrients it can use.

Your basic premise is wrong they are not the same thing at all. Soylent doesn't replace a meal, it is a meal with all the nutrients. Slimfast was designed to supplement food to lose weight. The nutritional aspects of each are totally different.

SlimFast is designed to "supplement" food in that they suggest you replace two meals a day with it. The difference is that SlimFast doesn't suggest replacing three meals.

Is Slimfast the same thing? It sounds like it's specifically meant to lose weight, which suggests it has a different purpose, and possibly a different composition, than Soylent does.

A 400 calorie bottle of Soylent has 9g of sugar, a 181 calorie bottle of Slimfast has 18g of sugar. That's 4 times as much sugar per calorie. Similarly, a 220 calorie bottle of Ensure has 15g of sugar, about 3 times as much per calorie. Cynically, Slimfast is for people trying to convince themselves that they're being healthy and losing weight, and Ensure is for people who have to stay hydrated while suffering from diarrhea. It's hardly a surprise why they hasn't caught on with the HN crowd as meal replacements like Soylent has: they're not made for it.

The spin of the marketing is almost certainly part of it, Soylent being marketed as "don't bother stepping away from that super important coding problem, just have some soylent," but it's also the first marketed (non-medical) product that really aims to be nutritionally complete and balanced. There are certainly criticisms you could levy at Soylent WRT whether they've succeeded at that goal, but at least it's their goal.

When Soylent was first announced but wasn't available yet, it struck me as something I'd like so I tried Slimfast (and Ensure).

Had to drink a lot to get enough energy and it was way too sugary and sweet – it gave me the sick feeling I get when I have only donuts or something for breakfast. The sugar free version tasted too much of aspartame.

I'd be happy to try something else with the same sweetness balance of Soylent if you have a suggestion.

Not all people taste food the same way. Some people don't have a strong sense of taste, so eating Soylent all/some of the time is just not a big deal to them. Just the same as how some people are tone deaf, so music is not important to them. Or colorblind people can't tell the difference between red and green, so stoplights aren't a big deal to them. Wait a minute...

But really I think a lot of the Soylent hate comes from the fact that people assume their own senses are the best judge, when really we only have a sample size of one. It doesn't even have to be a lack of sense acuity as I said above, but just personal taste. People come in all different types, and that's cool.

I don't really care about food. If I didn't have to eat anymore, that would be amazing! I tried Soylent and it was disgusting, though. Couldn't stomach it.

Honest question: Why not just make yourself a bowl of lentils? Definitely more nutritious than this stuff and very easy to make it bulk/reheat.

More nutritious? Uh... no. I have no idea why you'd think that. The nutrition facts[1] on the powder show that you can basically live on the stuff and receive 100% of your micro and macro nutrients. Which is the whole point.

[1]: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0421/5993/t/4/assets/Compl...

Uh, you realize that nutrient absorption means that you can't just eat the molecules that you need and stay healthy? That's why products in the same space as Soylent, like Ensure, have a lot of research involved.

Given the amount of people that are consuming large amounts of this stuff and reporting their progress, I'd have expected any serious nutrient deficiencies to have been reported quite a while ago.

I'd suggest that you read research on the topic instead of having expectations. Some things only affect some people. Other things take a long time to develop.

Absolutely not. You can be deficient in some mineral for your entire life, with the only thing to show for it a permanent light rash and an increased chance of colon cancer. E.g over 50% of the population is deficient in magnesium, even following conservative daily suggested intakes.

People report Soylent 'curing' rashes: that's exactly the opposite happening. They were deficient in e.g. zinc until now and finally got enough through Soylent. A good multivitamin would also have solved it.

Is there a test to find out whether you're deficient in Zinc, Magnesium etc? Tailored vitamin/mineral supplements could be a pretty cool startup.

Multivitamins are starting to get the stink-eye from medical science [1][2]

There's argument to be made for supplementing a known deficiency, but it seems as if you're better off eating it in food rather than a supplement.

[1]: http://annals.org/aim/article/1789253/enough-enough-stop-was...

[2]: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/07/the-vitami...

Coffiest actually tastes pretty good. Doesn't have the soy-ish taste and texture of regular Soylent, and if you like coffee then you'll also enjoy the mild coffee flavor in it.

Traditional social eating is deeply embedded into the culture I was brought up in. However, that doesn't stop me from experimenting with food that requires no preparation, no ordering, no waiting when I am in a hurry to accomplish a life goal.

That said, of course I would never support "soylent" anything if it is making people energy/immune system/vitamin deficient no matter how many classic dystopian novels it names its food after.

I love the Soylent concept. I did it for a good amount of last year (before getting a job with free food).

My only complaints:

* Too expensive

* Too inconvenient (It leaves a residue on everything, and mixing a pitcherful consistently was a chore)

I'm anorexic. This shit is amazing.

There are a lot of products, like Ensure, which have a much longer researched track record than Soylent. It's more than sticking a few things into a powder.

As far as I can tell, Ensure is just sugary chocolate milk with vitamin pills, ie it has horrible macro-nutrient balance.

Its not like these companies do their own research anyways; its an application of the same nutritional studies everyone else has access too.

And I see no evidence that Soylent paid any attention to basic things, like what you need to also eat in order to absorb the necessary nutrients. While Ensure has more sugar that I'd like, at least it's not totally ignorant.

>>And I see no evidence that Soylent paid any attention to basic things, like what you need to also eat in order to absorb the necessary nutrients.

Care to elaborate? What exactly do you mean by "what you need to also eat in order to absorb the necessary nutrients"?

Different food items will have different absorption rates for the nutrients they contain when passing through your stomach, upper & lower intestine. For example, an apple may contain a small amount of iron absorbed at a rate of 20%, while a steak may contain significantly more, with an absorption rate of 80%.

These absorption rates can also vary widely from person to person, based on the flora in your gut, the drugs you ingest, your diet, and also certain DNA (eg. most East Asians never developed specific lactose related digestive abilities [1]) and ancestry can significantly alter this too.

For example, my grandfather had issues with high iron absorption, thus he would regularly donate blood to get rid of the excess iron in his bloodstream. Neither I nor my immediate family share that issue, but he made dietary choices based in part on avoiding iron rich food (like the iron enriched cookies I used to eat, mmm).

TL;DR: Your body & the food you eat are very complex things to understand, and we understand the tiniest sliver about it. Highly processed food likely misses important nutrients you need.

1 - https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/lactose-intolerance#statis...

But how much fast food has paid attention to those things? That Soylent is not perfect does not mean it's not better than the likely alternative.

Food like this that's specifically tuned to your own metabolism would be fantastic of course, but just getting some healthy stuff into you instead of whatever the vending machine sells, is already an enormous improvement for a lot of people.

Look up Ensure's nutritional label. It's just sugary flavored water. It's calorie dense nothingness for people who have trouble keeping anything more complex down.

Ensure gives me digestive issues that I haven't experienced with soylent. Obviously I'd love some more insight into why.

> It's not just eating it, it's all the flavours and ingredients and cooking with friends and loved ones and parties and such.

One possible angle for explanation is that if you're already missing these things, there's only upside. Additionally, it seems most who use soylent don't use it to replace all meals, but only some where time savings is the primary consideration. Anecdotally, I searched for bars that would do the same thing some years ago, because I had no patience for cooking anything, no friends or family to enjoy it with, and always something more interesting to use my time for.

That's still largely true today. Cooking anything more than a very simple meal is a big indulgence, and will leave me questioning why I spent all the time I did preparing it. When cooking these days, usually I will prepare a few days' worth of food at a time, sacrificing time in the short-term for savings later without feeling pressured to eat something quick and unhealthy (and potentially expensive).

Soylent -- the idea, not necessarily any particular product -- seems very attractive in this case.

I appreciate your position. I agree there is more to good than mere nutrition. There is also a segment on HN that likes the idea of hacking biology, especially their own. They seem good more as fuel for an engine than something to be enjoyed.

> I think I'll just stick to Quest bars

Oooh, protein bar talk! Lately I'm liking EAS Myoplex 30 Chocolate Peanut Butter and NuGo Dark Mint Chocolate Chip. For when I'm uh..."too busy"...

yes I agree, the lack of bulk would be one of the many worries I'd have about eating this regularly (if you know what I mean). Is it really that hard to go and pick up some groceries? This would probably keep you alive for a while, but is it really worth it? even prisoners get better food.

Rhinehart asserted from the start that Soylent was meant to replace shitty meals like the Big Mac consumed at your desk alone. There was and still is a lot of misunderstanding about this. One of his interviews took place at some LA hipster fried chicken place. He's not antifood or antisocial.

Really? When Soylent was first announced, I'm pretty sure I read something where Rhinehart was positioning Soylent as the primary source of meals, with the occasional real meal thrown in as a luxury.

Can't both be true for different people?

No, this particular question has an empirical answer.

He asserted this from the start???

Here's the Tilt crowdfunding page: https://wayback.archive.org/web/20141012152640/https://crowd...

Note, it's titled "Soylent Free Your Body". Here are some phrases in the short post:

  "What if you never had to worry about food again?"
  "Soylent frees you from the time and money spent
  shopping, cooking and cleaning, puts you in excellent 
  health, and vastly reduces your environmental impact by 
  eliminating much of the waste and harm coming from 
  agriculture, livestock, and food-related trash."

Packages available:

  $255 One month supply of Soylent
  We'll ship enough soylent to fully replace one month's worth of meals

This is after he went on a 30 day experiment titled "How I Stopped Eating Food" http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298

Don't forget:

"Soylent™ was developed from a need for a simpler food source."

"No need to shop for individual ingredients or plan ahead" (I think this one was Mealsquares)

"You’ve got more important things to do than worry about food."

"Enjoy a 26 hour day"

I wrote a parody post based on the marketing on the web page and my own personal outrage with the claims:

https://medium.com/@__1/on-food-and-not-cooking-4c9fba0d2d20

I still believe my note is true:

    Note: Neither Soylent nor Mealsquares make any public claims that I could find, 
    beneficial or otherwise, about using their product for the complete nutrition 
    of women, especially those expecting or nursing, children, teenagers, the 
    elderly, or people with medical conditions, including malnutrition. I think 
    it’s probably optimized for healthy males, aged 20–40-ish, or in the words 
    of Soylent: “All Adults”, but I don’t have a B.S. in Electrical Engineering 
    like Rob, so I probably shouldn’t comment. 
    
    Please proceed at your own risk just in case.

https://vimeo.com/107941191

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