The Soylent delusion and the folly of food-hacking | Hacker News Reader

The Soylent delusion and the folly of food-hacking

joanwestenberg.com

19 pointsdotcoma20 comments

This author is so offended by the idea of meal substitutes that they attempt to dress them up as class warfare. Such baseless, emotional absurdity

Not disagreeing with your point, but I don’t understand why people call these baseless arguments “emotional”.

The aim of the person making the argument is to try and use someone else’s plight and disadvantages as a reason to excuse their choices.

They don’t do this by tugging on heart strings. They do this by trying to position themselves as a 3rd party neutral observer which makes the reader more likely to believe that their claim that a claimed injustice is real or a claimed solution will work.

It’s not an attempt to deceive through emotion. It’s an attempt to deceive by making themselves appear as neutral and unbiased.

"3rd party neutral observer" Taking a look at the rest of the blog, this one's anything but.

I don’t think it is emotional manipulation, I think it is emotional reasoning. They use a vague claim of violent diarrhea and the change of a CEO to make the case that meal substitutes have failed at the only thing they claim to do (false) and that Silicon Valley is out of touch for applying reasoning to something they don’t actually understand.

I would be interested in an article making a case against these drinks that used some kind of substantial argument, but this is not it. The article may as well be an anti vaccine article claiming vaccines give you diarrhea, our bodies regulate themselves, and big pharma is trying to get you hooked on a recurring revenue model to create a class divide. A pseudo-intellectual argument worked backward from trying to explain the “feeling” that putting chemicals in your body is bad.

Reading between the lines, I suspect the real root of the argument is that the author has an emotion - they don’t like the idea of Soylent or the brand that was created behind it - and is jumping through hoops to rationalize that feeling.

No, she’s merely saying that it could end up like that. And given the existence of “food deserts” in low-income neighbourhoods, or the fact that those who eat at fast-food joints tend to be poor… I think she has a point. She is over-stretching it, it’s true, but I don’t see it as so unlikely.

My reading of the article is that the author doesn't think that picking the dystopian view of what food will become from a well known sci-fi movie and trying to make that into product is the best thing for humanity.

The richness of the human experience is found in variety. The moment we give that up we lose something. Experiencing food in all its many forms is one of the joys of life.

Similary, I love curated lists of songs and movies from other people the push me outside of the realm of what I seek out on my own. They have a richness that the infinite scrolling screens of AI generated suggestions are missing. Moveover, other people notice things about you and adjust their suggestions according to your emotional state. Down and depressed? Maybe a friend will suggest an insightful comedy to lift you up a bit. AI generated suggestions never seem to do that for me.

And soylent is yet more variety right?

Sure, replacing a meal with different items and textures in it with a single pasty liquid is so much more variety.

You are more than free to not buy and consume it...

That's missing the entire point of my posts. My issue is that the vision being taken and made into being is the one from a dystopian future. Why not aim for a more utopian view of society instead? Focus on solving actual world problems that will make people's lives better as opposed to taking ideas from futures that most people would agree that they want to avoid.

Calling an upset stomach a significant side effect is ridiculous. There is an incredibly trivial reason for this: A normal amount of fiber after a very fiber-poor diet (relatively common for folks in the US) is going to give your stomach some issues while it adjusts.

This article ends up reading like a naturalistic fallacy writ large, and I think it is: The author's conclusion is explicitly "Our needs and drives have been shaped by millions of years of co-evolution [...]", which is a very lukewarm take.

I legitimately loved Soylent when I gave it a shot. I didn't have to waste my lunch hour going to the same tired restaurants and overpay for the same tired food, or spend extra time and money to meal-prep the night before. Soylent was always there. And if you didn't want Soylent that day, those options still existed, and they tasted better because Soylent does indeed have the taste and texture of watery cardboard. I never had any desires to go "full-time", since food plays a much larger role in our lives than nourishment, and the science behind Soylent was already questionable being based on US population dietary guidelines.

I often felt better drinking Soylent, although in retrospect it was probably because it was half the calories of a restaurant meal. A Soylent "meal" is only 400 calories. But the second box regularly gave me gastrointestinal problems and I quit. I tried many of the later formulas and competing brands, but that problem creeps up often enough that it's not worth the investment.

I think the notion of Soylent solving hunger problems, or being subsidized and given to the poor, was never really in the plan. It was a form of greenwashing, a way for their users to think they were involved in something good for the world.

The biggest take I got from my soylent journey was, it’s not Perfect, but better than a lot of what people eat. coke and a bag a chips vs a bottle of soylent? Soylent is going to be a much better take.

These emotional critique articles completely miss that. There obliviously unaware of the state of most peoples diets across the classes.

Nothing beats some green veggies from your garden and some fish you caught with friends, but we don’t all have that luxury

I’ve heard about Soylent and wanted to know more but this article is void of any facts and feels like a rage blog by someone who already has a grudge against programmers. Bummer.

Ive drank soylent for every meal for over a decade and plan to continue. Its healthier than how I used to eat, it triggers none of my allergies, its cheap, its quick, and I enjoy the taste. Just had a checkup and all my vitals are perfect.

I've never tried Soylent but in 2019 I started eating Huel and since August 2020 every single calorie I have ingested, except when eating with friends, has been from Huel.

In that time my high blood pressure has disappeared, my elevated cholesterol has disappeared, I have gone from pre-diabetic to normal, every single result in every single blood test it is possible for a general practitioner to order is exactly, not almost but actually exactly, in the middle of the normal range. That was NOT the case before.

My teeth haven't fallen out, in fact because I ingest practically no sugar my teeth are spectacular. I don't longingly pine for a steak or salad, and I haven't withered away into nothing on a diet of ground-up plants and such.

The three or so times per week I eat "typical" foods with friends I laugh and chat and peck at my food and then go back to what works for me.

On top of all that I feel fantastic and have hours more time every day-- except unlike most lifehackers I use my extra time to relax and do nothing.

If that's a delusion call me Don fucking Quixote.

I actually think the Cafe Mocha Soylent is really good. It allows me to easily calorie count breakfast while providing caffeine.

What an annoying polemic. Sure, Soylent is at once both the plaything of diet-hacking tech bros and the subsistence food we'll shovel to the poor in the coming dystopian nightmare.

They present no fundamental issue with the notion of a nutritionally-complete formula. What they do instead is note that there are unanswered questions, and extrapolate from there that the questions are unanswerable, or worse, that it's a moral failure to have the curiosity to even ask.

Unrepresented here is anyone who likes or has benefited from this product.

Soylent is neither particularly popular nor cheap. Try again when the hypotheticals you've constructed have some credible relationship with reality.

I lost 50 pounds while drinking only Soylent for a few months. It was a weird experience

Chocolate Soylent is delicious, can recommend.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com