The reason that oft-derided-as-woo-woo granola crowd is actually making the logicallly sound choice here is because given the lack of conclusive science, the default assumption should be that a diet closer to what our ancestors ate is a safer bet than a brand new diet that we fabricate based on incomplete and presumptive knowledge.
On the other hand, what you are saying here sounds extremely pseudo-science-y and hand-wavy. You're basically saying "well, 'real' food is different because something something molecules, it's hard to say exactly how but..."
Soylent CEO on the other hand is arguing from first principles:
- Our bodies need macro- and micro-nutrients - We have a pretty good (although imperfect) understanding of how much of each we need to consume - Therefore, we can probably get rid of all the extraneous stuff associated with nutrient consumption (prep, cooking, clean-up, etc.) and still achieve the same results
Here is the hard truth: there is no science here on either side. There's a subjective judgement about how complete our knowledge is. I say nutritional science is still in the dark ages and therefore we don't have evidence to conclude a pile of molecules is the same as traditional food, Soylent CEO says nutritional science is "pretty good" and the only thing that matters about food are its measured consituents and there in the absence of evidence we should just assume that eating the exact same thing in liquid form at metered intervals should be perfectly healthy.
For you to suggest he is arguing from first principles is absolutely ridiculous, his argument is chock full of hubris and assumptions. It's very very wrong to hold that up as an example of sound scientific thinking.
What you say is wrong, though. We have a pretty good understanding of how food works and what our bodies need. How do you think hospitals feed comatose patients? They do it either via a feeding tube (liquid food), or through an IV (fluids containing glucose, salts, amino acids, lipids and micronutrients).
Here is what Elon Musk said about batteries when asked to give an example of his first-principles thinking:
Somebody could say, “Battery packs are really expensive and that’s just the way they will always be… Historically, it has cost $600 per kilowatt hour. It’s not going to be much better than that in the future.”
With first principles, you say, “What are the material constituents of the batteries? What is the stock market value of the material constituents?”
It’s got cobalt, nickel, aluminum, carbon, some polymers for separation and a seal can. Break that down on a material basis and say, “If we bought that on the London Metal Exchange what would each of those things cost?”
It’s like $80 per kilowatt hour. So clearly you just need to think of clever ways to take those materials and combine them into the shape of a battery cell and you can have batteries that are much, much cheaper than anyone realizes.”
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Thinking of batteries as being made of cobalt, nickel, aluminum etc. is EXACTLY THE SAME THING as thinking of food as being made of proteins, fats, carbs, etc. There isn't anything special about a piece of chicken - it's a combination of molecules, some of which are digestible by the human body, i.e. nutrients. Therefore, taking those nutrients and putting them into a meal replacement shake is perfectly fine. And incidentally, just like in Musk's example, treating the nutrients individually and assembling them into a shake results in much cheaper food.
https://www.soylent.com/product/powder/
That's pretty damn cheap, especially compared to the "average diet", which consists of eating out on a regular basis.
And Soylent is at least 40% more expensive than even buying freerange organic food to make your own meals.
Which is insane for the horrible quality it has.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/156416/americans-spend-151-week-f...
Soylent costs $1.93 per meal, which comes down to $5.79 per day. In other words, about a quarter of the average daily spend.
I'm also not sure where you came up with "horrible quality." Care to qualify - or better yet, quantify - that claim?
As for eating out, another survey in 2013 showed that 58% of Americans eat out at least once a week. That's way higher than you claim.
http://m.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/gener...
Which spends on average 225 bucks a month[1] on food. That comes down to 7.50€ a day.
Soylent, including shipping, is actually more expensive than this.
> As for eating out, another survey in 2013 showed that 58% of Americans eat out at least once a week. That's way higher than you claim.
The German statistics for that are below 13%.
> I'm also not sure where you came up with "horrible quality." Care to qualify - or better yet, quantify - that claim?
I’m comparing Soylent, a product with no taste, no texture, which is basically torture, with cheaper, higher quality meals, handmade, with organic ingredients.
Soylent can’t measure up in taste or variety even to public cafeteria food.
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From a very basic, we can be quite sure that a very simple model roughly describes the system (as in "there are calories and the human body is bound by the laws of thermodynamics"). We also no that it is not that simple, because a biological organism is a very, very complex machine.
Everything else is mostly the attempt to find a "simpler model" than "its a complex biological machine and we need very large empirical studies to understand it" and mostly fails. In that sense, soylent is on a similar level as the "detox" crowd. Pretty sure their mission statement is not right. They might get some stuff right by accident. Other stuff is wrong.
Of course thinking in "right" and "wrong" is also an oversimplification, as we should probably use "better on the average population" or "worse on average population".
The stone-age crowd has a point in using kind of an evolutionary explanation for what food to choose. On the other hand their premise "we eat what our ancestors ate, because thats what our body has optimized for" is seriously flawed in its own logic, because we won't reproduce the hunter-gatherer environment when switching diets, and they don't account for the adaptability of the genome, as well as the variance of diets among hunter-gatherer cultures and early stone age farmers.
There will never be "conclusive" science regarding how and what we eat without experimentation. Soylent is, regardless of how the founders frame it, an experiment. A fairly successful one, at that.
Obviously not completely successful, given that this story is about them utterly failing, but that failure is temporary. They will recover.
The answer is no. It's not just about molecules.
An example of a related principle is "need" vs "what's needed when it's needed". How much vitamin C do you "need"? Oh, wait, it affects iron absorption.
That concept utterly eludes you?
Whether Soylent qualifies as "unnatural" depends on whether its ingredients, and the amounts of them, are nutritious and not poisonous. Humanity hasn't yet reached a point where we have definite answers to questions like that.