Blue maybe, but probably not green which is often associated with algae growth in fluids.
One of the most interesting thing about this whole campaign is seeing who is afraid of it. Now that provides some interesting insights.
One of the most interesting thing about this whole campaign is seeing who is afraid of it. Now that provides some interesting insights.
Well let me qualify that. I wouldn't trust my health to eating primarily an engineered food solution as he is doing. In the grand scheme of things it's a lot less scary than the majority of "food" that you see for sale everywhere in the developed world. At least he is trying to create a healthy food rather than something that addicts people and maximizes margins. So I think it's better than the status quo, far less scary than Coca Cola for instance.
But the part that scares me is the idea that a healthy diet can be engineered. As far as I've seen, our understanding of diet and human metabolism is in the dark ages. I wouldn't trust a nutritionist to engineer a diet any more than I would trust a medieval "doctor" to cure me by bloodletting.
So what insight does that provide about me?
Soldiers mostly live off an engineered diet; last I checked they tend to be healthy. Hospitals serve engineered meals. Just because they're using whole foods doesn't really change the fact that they are deliberately building a diet made to supply every nutriment needed by a human being.
And the alternative, the status quo for the majority of the population, is even worse. We're just prodding at random without even thinking about what nutriments we're eating, hoping that somehow we won't forget to eat enough of one crucial nutriment.
What is important for Soylent is that it is clear for everyone who decides to use it extensively to listen to their body. People who die due to bad diets don't go from healthy to dead in 5 seconds. People die when they believe that feeling bad or weak is a normal effect of their diet. They ignore their body when it tells them that there's something wrong. As long as everyone on it knows to stop or see a doctor if they feel in any way worse after starting Soylent, the danger is minimal.
This isn't a particularly deep insight, lots of people are, but one of the interesting things about Soylent is that if you eat a 'normal' diet (which is to say one recommended as a 'healthy diet' by the FDA) you ingest all of the same chemicals in much the same ratios.
If you were pathologically afraid of the unknown (and some folks are) then you would first sterilize some soil, then put it into a garden with an isolation layer and drainage system, then populate it with a soil biome that you had previously done DNA analysis on to insure you understood which bacteria and fungi were present, and then you would water only with distilled water, plants that you had also sequenced which allowed you to ascertain the lack of tampering with their genome, and fertilizer from fish or chicken for which you controlled all of their consumption.
You wouldn't really do that, because you've grown up and seen people all around you eating stuff. And long before you could reason about these things you got hungry, ate, and got full, and it hasn't hurt you to do so and you continued on your path.
The current things you "trust your health" to have, especially if you buy any packaged food, been engineered in ways that are way more extreme than what has happened to Soylent in order to make you buy more of them. The book "In Defense of Food" [1] by Michael Pollan goes into great detail about the things folks do which make Rob sound pretty mild.
You state "As far as I've seen, our understanding of diet and human metabolism is in the dark ages." Which is an understandable bit of hyperbole but the reality is that you trust in the defensive mechanisms of your body which have evolved over millennia to get as much as they can out of what ever you put into your digestive system, whether it be Beluga caviare or rice beetles.
If you look at the situation non-emotionally (and that is very hard to do), then you see that based on your belief that we're in the dark ages of nutrition science, and the chemicals in choice A and choice B are the same. The predicted outcome of consuming all of A or B as your primary food source is "no difference." However, as most people I know who have gone through this emotional journey, what does change is you start actually being aware of what you are eating and making choices based on that and it does have an outcome since you change behavior when you identify a correlation between eating X and outcome Y.
If Soylent becomes cheaper than the previous products [1], it would definitely help more people.
For people living in the US, I agree with you and I don't think it's a solution :
If we take 2 different people, whose optimal intake is 2500 kcal, I'm pretty sure that among these 2500 kcal, one person would need x% of protein and y% of carbs, whereas the other person would need x2% and y2%, so how can Soylent fix this ?
If we can figure out what the x,y,x2,y2 exact values are, then people could get their personalized Soylent, but we're far from it.
[1] http://www.wfp.org/nutrition/special-nutritional-products
Beyond that, the distracted 16 year old is not suggesting that you consume McDonalds as your sole source of nutrition (in fact, he doesn't care at all what you eat); pretty much everyone agrees that eating only McDonalds is a terrible idea, how that gets twisted into a defense of Soylent is just baffling.
When I eat a burger at McDonalds, I know what I'm getting and it surely isn't for the health benefits.
The green suggestion was in reference to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green, a joke.
Instinctively, we're not really attracted to blue food because no natural food is blue.
There is a few counter examples like the blue Gatorade, but it's 100% liquid, I can't think of any soup-texture food that is blue.
Blue smoothies are pretty visually attractive.
(Blueberry puree is not blue : http://www.adventuresinshaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/b... )