Like my electric razor, I have my safety razor too, but it's so much faster to use my electric.
A coworker has a beard so he can save 5 minutes in the morning, is it lazy to want time to do other things?
Those things were invented to avoid displeasure. Most people find eating pleasurable, it's something they actively seek to do.
It's like saying "guys, I've invented a way to have children without that boring orgasm nonsense".
For some small segment of the population, that is the best news ever. But I don't seeing it being a break-out hit with the general public.
This is where you lose me.
Extending my analogy, you're replacing sex thrice daily with anorgasmic sex, thrice daily.
I'm not seeing the upside.
Companies with actual dietitians and biologists and millions of dollars and labs and decades of lead time haven't been able to create a total replacement for food. There are too many variations in what different people need, too many as-yet unknown conditionally-essential nutrients. That's why all the existing replacement formulae are marketed as being for temporary use only.
Haven't they? I've seen this claim repeatedly in debates about Soylent, but I've never seen it substantiated other than by pointing to marketing claims on related meal replacement products, which may be motivated very much in part by there not being any real benefits to claiming it is a full food replacement, coupled with a lot of potential downsides such as the risk of lawsuits, increased scrutiny by the FDA, etc.
Maybe they haven't been able to. Or maybe they haven't tried (as opposed to try to make something "close enough" for suitability for medical use or occasional meal replacement). Or maybe they have been able to, but there's simply not enough additional revenue potential compared to the potential costs and risks of making the claim.
The only reason there isn't any such product in the consumer market is because there's little incentive for it: too commoditized, lots of liability.
at one level you're right. Millions of dogs live off a handful of composite foodstuffs.
However, when you have millions of test subjects, you quickly discover what's missing and people won't sue you for wrongful death. You also have the advantage that if a peculiar deficiency emerges in a small part of the population, a vet will probably remedy it -- or the dog will get sick and die and nobody will be the wiser.
Finally, note that most dog foods are not really composed chemicals in the sense that Soylent proposes to be. They are usually processed food -- usually made of offcuts and mechanically recovered meat considered unsuitable for human consumption -- dried, ground, emulsified and then fortified with additives.
It's not really food replacement. It's food.
Yes, there may be some of those chemicals that we haven't yet recognized as being important to a healthy diet. However, since quite a few people (not just Rob, there's an entire community built around this doing DIY Soylent for the past few months) have been fine on Soylent for a significant amount of time, there's not much reason to think that we're missing anything life-or-death important. We certainly know that there isn't anything in your typical fast-food meal that is both important for health and missing from Soylent.
It seems like you have two main objections. First, judging from your posts, you really fucking love food. That's cool, and I'm happy that you can get that much enjoyment from eating, but a lot of us don't. Second, you seem to think that there's a fundamental difference between food and not-food (Soylent). If you look at the chemistry though, there really isn't. In fact, Soylent has significantly more healthful nutrients than the average American's diet.
That all said, nobody is trying to convince you to convert to Soylent. I couldn't care less where you get your nutrition. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for the same courtesy in the other direction.
Imagine not having to eat most of the time, but always having two hours set aside every Wednesday night to cook a feast.
And it goes on. Perhaps you really enjoy Caesar salad. I know I do. When I am trialling a new place I will often order the Caesar salad as a reasonably reliable proxy for the quality of the kitchen, because it is a finicky thing to put together and requires the ingredients to be fresh and properly balanced.
Over-oily croutons? Bzzt. Stale cos leaves? Bzzt. Swimming in commercial dressing? Bzzt.
So if you have a particular favourite dish, you can enjoy the excitement of discovering the different ways different chefs can approach it. Consider the humble BBQ rib. There are a few schools of thought on the simple question of how to apply heat. And then you get into dry rub and wet rub, what herbs, what spices, what order they're applied ... the variety and possibilities are endless. Truly endless.
It's like wandering into the library and saying "well, I guess I could walk around the stacks and try the different books that catch my eye. Or I could stare at the 'this page intentionally left blank' in that dot matrix printer manual most days for the rest of my life."
Don't know what the distribution is, but that varies.
Other than not dying, I just don't get what all the fuss is about.
Some meals I eat for the enjoyment of the food. Those are meals I wouldn't replace with Soylent. Some meals I eat for the utility that the food provides; I'd happily replace some of those with Soylent.