Hacker News Reader

Comment by nbouscal | Hacker News Reader

No, it's more like if you were forced to have sex three times a day every single day, and most of those times it was with someone you weren't attracted to. Every time I eat fast food or takeout because I'm either too tired from work to cook or don't have enough time to, I feel terrible, I spend too much money, and I damage my body. If I can replace that experience with something reasonably healthful, affordable, and fast, that's a huge win for me. Yes, home-cooked healthful meals are fantastic, and I enjoy cooking and eating them. But be honest, how many people do you know that eat home-cooked healthful meals for every one of their meals? How about for even half of their meals? Some people have that privilege, but I'm not one of them. Soylent is a fantastic alternative.

View on HN

> Soylent is a fantastic alternative.

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.

Not at all. Say, for example, that I'm replacing fast food. In that scenario Soylent costs less money, takes less time (don't have to go to the fast food place, less time actually eating), is almost certainly healthier, and won't make me feel like crap afterwards. At this point I can't think of any way to continue extending the sex analogy that doesn't get a bit too off-color.

Apart from being calorically dense and salty, fast food is still food. Ordinary food, even fast food, contains an abundance of complex nutrients, some of which are only poorly understood.

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 been able to create a total replacement for food.

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.

Let's not kid ourselves. The original hook was replacing food.

I think you misunderstood vidarh's post. His/her second paragraph was referencing existing providers, not Soylent.

This is an absurd claim. We've had dry dog food for a long while now; we totally understand enough about nutrition to create complete diet replacements. Humans are more complex, but not orders of magnitude so.

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.

Dogs are not highly intelligent omnivores with average lives of 60+ years.

Having thought about it some more --

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.

Judging from this and other comments you've made, you seem to think of "food" as being something other than just chemicals. It's not. Food, just like humans, is just an assortment of chemicals. There is nothing mysterious about it, there are no hidden secrets that we can't discover with a microscope, it's just chemicals arranged in a certain pattern.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com