And oat drink should in no way be considered a tech stock. It is even less one than for example Tesla...
Similarly my understanding is that Cambly had a hard time raising their early round because all those VCs already knew English.
(This in no way justifies that valuation but I wanted to randomly chime in here.)
I don't mind it because of thinking that having a bit of it in every other cup of coffee is poison, it's more that the aftertaste is less enjoyable than straight espresso or an americano now that I notice it.
Time to give soy lattes a try, lactose intolerance is a literal PITA.
Edit: Personally I think the key to fast progress is better and better whitebox modelling of the body. More diagnostics and sensors to rapidly detect and respond to issues. When that is in place, we can do more fearless experimentation, secure in the knowledge that if something trends bad we can catch it quickly and abort / reverse.
I do not share your optimism, because you forgot about economy, investors and shareholders driving science forward, not viceversa. The primary goal for public companies is to increase revenue and market share, not creating healthier food than nature, if unhealthier food sells more.
Also, I do not share the hubris that science wins over nature. We have evolved to thrive on what exists in nature, it is not logical to assume we would thrive more with something we are not evolved for. Especially when profit, not health, is the primary driving force.
I guess I'll keep eating real meat and real vegetables.
Unless it's science to scale up tradition food systems and abandon the unhealthy food system we have today.
Whew that was taxing to write in HNglish.
My man, look at your second paragraph, even the high tech mitigation strategy you came up with is what can be done in short enough term to be part of a product development process, it won't change anything from the situation now.
The problem is not acute toxicity that is measurable in the short term, we have that nailed down or else people would be dropping dead fulminated from new Oreo flavors, but rather very long-term effects, sensors to respond rapidly will do nothing when the problem is what your diet does to you over the course of years.
The culprit is being pinned down as the high concentrations of linoleic acid, but this is all in hindsight, after decades of having people consume these things, there's absolutely no way you'll be able to run a controlled experiment for something like this even with gizmos that measure everything that you, right now, think you should measure.
Heck how are you going to know which of the technological marvels that people are consuming all the time is the one to blame?
when I first started learning about, I was not aware of all the intricacies of food: all the minerals, and vitamins and flavanols, fiber and countless other things that make up "real food". I think people tend to simplify food into just a few small variables (like protein and vitamin C) and think that's all there is to it. And it's nowhere near that simple. No matter how much I dig, there's more and more things to understand about a given food. Asking industry to produce better food than nature is like saying, I want to score higher on this test than the grading rubric. It just doesn't make sense.
I think the future should be making normal natural healthy foods accessible to more people. Why don't we have apple trees, fruit trees and citrus trees in every park and next to every sidewalk? this shouldn't be hard thing to accomplish.
Vehicles have air conditioning but that doesn't make motor companies appliance companies or HVAC companies either.
It depends on what the company's core value proposition is. Toyota's is clearly a car company. Tesla is now more of a car company, but there was a time when they had no or few cars but still had the battery and driving tech. Their valuation and promise was of bringing a new technology to the world, rather than a physical product.